Actually two. The two things Flannery O’Connor says that I’ve memorized for when I can no longer, no matter how hard I try, dodge those questions about why the books I like and write tend to be violent and dark — whatever that means. I offer them freely to you, to memorize for when you get those same questions. They’re the smartest things ever said on the subject, and truer now than they’ve ever been. Both are from my favorite book about writing, her Mystery and Manners. (And, yes, I know, sooner or later I should write a long post about how wonderful France was, and I will, but today I’m thinking about Flannery.)

When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.

And.

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his senses tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.