![]() ![]() Though recently I’ve begun to wonder if I completely agree with O’Connor’s fantasy/realism equation. Problem solved, and I feel as if I’ve earned my keep. ![]() This usually reassures my nervous student, and me, too: yes, I approve of stories written outside the genre of realism, but I’ve also made it clear that writing a story dipped in fantastic waters comes with the powerful craft challenge of earning a reader’s acceptance through attention to detail. I would even go so far as to say that the person writing a fantasy has to be even more strictly attentive to the concrete detail than someone writing in a naturalistic vein-because the greater the story’s strain on credulity, the more convincing the properties in it have to be.” A thing is fantastic because it is so real, so real that it is fantastic. Even when one writes a fantasy, reality is the proper basis of it. ![]() I mean that we always begin with what is or with what has an eminent possibility of truth about it. “Fiction is an art that calls for the strictest attention to the real-whether the writer is writing a naturalistic story or a fantasy. Whenever a student comes to my office worried about whether he or she could write a “non-realistic” story for one of my classes, I always approvingly quote this passage from Flannery O’Connor’s essay “Writing Short Stories” (included in her classic collection of literary essays, Mystery and Manners): ![]()
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