I'm Gretchen Rubin and this is a little happier.

I'm a huge fan of the writer Flanery O'Connor.

Now, Flanery O'Connor is not for everyone.

She's a novelist and short story writer.

Her style is sometimes described as southern Gothic.

Her character is sometimes described as grotesque.

She writes very intense mind-blowing stuff.

In fact, I love her fiction so much I almost can't bear to read it.

And so I spend a lot of time reading her nonfiction.

And there's a line in her essay called writing short stories

that has just haunted me.

And you know how sometimes someone will write something that just sticks in your head.

And this is something that she wrote about some work that she was doing on her stories.

I wish I could read it in her very distinctive Georgia accent,

but you're just going to have to imagine that.

Flanery O'Connor writes,

I lent some stories to a country lady who lives down the road for me.

And when she returned them, she said,

well, then stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do.

And I thought to myself that that was right.

When you write stories, you have to be content to start exactly there.

Showing how some specific folks will do.

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