Write This: Vicious Grace
A Writing Prompt Based on Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”
Welcome to the February installment of Write This, where Solum presents a brief reflection and writing prompt for you to engage with in your preferred medium. You can either delve into the prompts on your own, or join our Paid Subscriber Workshops in our Substack chat, where you can submit your piece to receive enriching feedback from fellow peers and members of Solum’s masthead.
I was in high school when I read Flannery O’Connor for the first time. It was her short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and it still haunts me. By the end of it, there were a lot of dead bodies, and frankly, I found it disturbing. That’s just what O’Connor intended.
O’Connor is perhaps one of the most well-known Southern Gothic writers because her stories are so unnerving and strange. She isn’t known for cozy tales or sanitized allegories. She wrote about suffering and death in brutal, jarring ways. Her characters are some of the most despicable, self-righteous people you’ll ever meet, and her stories often end with gruesome, unsettling conclusions.
Though what I find most haunting about O’Connor’s work is how she depicts grace. In her stories, grace isn’t the comfortable, feel-good word taught in Sunday school classes. For O’Connor, grace is shocking. It’s vicious, always lurking on the edges of catastrophes and tragedies. Her characters often experience grace at moments of metaphorical (or literal) gunpoint, which is exactly what happens in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”
If you haven’t read the story (spoilers ahead), it follows a rather dysfunctional family on a road trip to Florida, which sounds safe enough. The trip, though, takes a somber turn when the family’s car crashes and they stumble upon three escaped convicts on the side of the road. It becomes a fatal encounter when, by story’s end, the family has all been shot to death by a notorious criminal named “The Misfit” and his two cronies.
It’s dark stuff. Really dark stuff, almost bleak to the point of hopelessness. But to dismiss the story as simply grotesque for the sake of shocking is to miss O’Connor’s meaningful appraisal of grace. To understand this, we must examine the character of the grandmother.
For most of the story, the grandmother is a hypocritical, bitter old woman. She’s much like the Pharisees in the New Testament1—a white-washed tomb, spiritually dead on the inside while presenting moral superiority on the outside. She’s deluded herself with her twisted sense of morality, but it’s violence that uncovers her hypocrisy and allows her to see her own desperate need for salvation. At the story’s end, The Misfit holds her at gunpoint. It’s here, while staring death in the face, that the grandmother experiences true grace, and it fills her with compassion for the man about to kill her:
“His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, ‘Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!’”2
Violence yanks the grandmother out of her blind ignorance, opening her eyes to her soul’s true condition. As The Misfit says, the grandmother “‘would of been a good woman… if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.’”3 A moment of unthinkable brutality brings her to this revelation; nothing else could’ve shattered her pharisaical worldview. She comes to the end of her rope, and it’s here that grace may begin its work.
Approaching this story as writers gives us an interesting lesson on how conflict can function in our writing. Conflict—or violence in O’Connor’s case—doesn’t exist only for tension’s sake or to provide narrative propulsion. It can do those things, of course, but O’Connor shows us that conflict can be a profound grace when it catalyzes character transformation and growth.
We find out who we really are when we face loss and suffering, and our characters should be no different. We encourage you to keep O’Connor’s ideas about grace in mind as you tackle this month’s writing prompt.
Write This:
Write an imaginative piece in which an acute source of conflict forces a character to change, grow, or recognize a truth about themselves or the world.
Today’s piece is brought to you by Solum’s wonderful intern, Sarah Tate.
Matthew 23:27-28
“A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor, pg. 14
“A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor, pg. 15
You had me at "Vicious Grace." I knew this was O'Connor, whom I adore as a writer and person. Can't wait to put pen to page.