Flannery O'Conner on seeing and writing

"I have a friend who is taking acting classes in New York from a Russian lady who is supposed to be good at teaching actors. My friend wrote me and told me that the first month they didn't speak a line, they only learned to see. Now learning to see is the basis of all arts except music. I know a good many fiction writers who paint, not because they're any good at painting, but because it helps their writing. It forces them to look at things. Fiction writing is very seldom a matter of saying things; it is a matter of showing things."

-Flannery O'Conner in Mystery and Manners

Flannery O'Conner's cinematic prose

Look at this excerpt from Flannery O'Conner's short story The Life You Save May Be Your Own:

Mr. Shiftlet's eye in the darkness was focused on a part of the automobile bumper that glittered in the distance. "Lady," he said, jerking his short arm up as if he could point with it to her house and yard and pump, "there ain't a broken thing on this plantation that I couldn't fix for you, one‑arm jackleg or not. I'm a man," he said with a sullen dignity, "even if I ain't a whole one. I got," he said, tapping his knuckles on the floor to emphasize the immensity of what he was going to say, "a moral intelligence!" and his face pierced out of the darkness into a shaft of doorlight and he stared at her as if he were astonished himself at this impossible truth.

Isn't that very filmic? It may just be by obsession with film, but it seems like that's a heck of a lot of acting, directing and cinematography for a paragraph, not to mention amazing writing.

Perhaps the Brothers Coen could take on one of her stories? Their new film (an adaptation of a novel by another writer of 'southern gothic'), No Country for Old Men, looks amazing.

P.S. I listened to the O'Conner story today on Miette's excellent Bedtime Stories podcast. Kind of strange listening to rednecks read with an English accent, but she's an excellent reader.