A Good Story is Hard to Find by Guest Blogger, CL Malone

What Can a 20th Century Short Story Writer Tell Us Today?

By CL Malone

Welcome to my first guest blog with the Maine Crime Writers. Thank you, Allison Keeton and Kate Flora, for the invitation. I’m genuinely honored.

In choosing content, I naturally segued to short stories. I had the good fortune to sell three short mystery fiction stories recently and am obsessed with the genre.

American genius, Flannery O’Connor, was a literary giant (and personal icon) who wrote powerful and disturbing short fiction in the twentieth century. At least, so says Google (the search engine and Gemini), Claude, and Chat GBT.

Of course, AI and its stepsisters (Chrome and Safari) can be mistaken. But fear not. My copy of Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works, Library of America, 1988, confirms it. Through a Southern Gothic lens, O’Connor offered twentieth-century readers nothing less than a unique way of seeing the world.

What advice can a writer of the last century offer us today? For the answer, let’s do a deep dive into her Twelve Tips of Writing.

By the way, O’Connor didn’t actually write her Twelve Tips of Writing. The tips are a compilation of her thoughts created posthumously by O’Connor’s partner and BF.

1. Consistent writing habits. O’Connor declared she wrote for 2 uninterrupted hours a day. Same time. Same place.

Good news, right? Two hours is doable. But uninterrupted? Same time? Same place? Yikes. What does that even mean?

2. A writer should find the crossroads where time, place, and eternity meet.

A bit esoteric but cool. Stories need time and place. Adding the universal (paraphrased by me) raises the story to the next level.

3. Arrange your novel backward and see what you see.

Yes! If you don’t know where you’re going, how will GPS get you there?

4. Stories need meaning. But meaning can’t be paraphrased. If it’s there, it’s there.

Subject to the caveat—double check with your beta reader.

5. Anything that makes you overly language-conscious is bad for a story, usually.

A little Elon Musk-ish with the qualifier. But good stuff. Are you listening, Claude?

6. Too much time to write is dangerous. If you have nothing else to do but write, you might get discouraged.

Wow. A true 20th-century concept. Free time is bad.

7. People without hope don’t write.

Or (paraphrasing), only optimistic people believe they can write. Substitute get published and she nailed it.

8. Writing a novel is a terrible experience. Your hair will fall out and teeth, decay.

I agree.

9. The omniscient narrator never speaks colloquially.

How would we know? Has anyone met one?

10. Writers can choose what they write about; not what they can make live.

So true! It takes a writer to make a story come alive. Sorry, AI.

11. The idiom—bad manners are better than no manners—is a condition that produces writers.

YES!

12. Humans are made of dust; if you scorn getting dusty, don’t try to write.

I might be wrong here, but dust, dirt, bones, blood… It’s possible O’Connor was projecting her inner mystery writer.

Summary: A literary giant is a literary giant for a reason. With respect, I believe O’Connor would tell writers today exactly what she told them before. Writers are human. Be fully present on the page.


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CL Malone

CL Malone is a short story writer, novelist, and retired attorney with 25 years of experience. Her short stories appear in Crime Spell’s Snakeberry: Best New England Crime Stories 2025, and soon in the Calgary 2026 Bouchercon Anthology. Her latest will be published in the Level Best Books Short anthology, Crime Before Our Time. In addition, she earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University, is a published children’s writer, an in-demand consultant with Grub Street Boston, and co-founder of Write On Productions, a publishing and teaching platform. You can reach her at http://www.clmalone.com.

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