This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Flannery O’Connor, whose works were widely misunderstood during her lifetime. Although her fiction has Catholic underpinnings, the stories are not populated with priests and nuns, nor can readers walk away with a tidy moral. In fact, many readers were so shocked by her use of violence they gave up on her stories altogether.

Even her own family failed to understand that Flannery used violence to show that sometimes it takes a shocking experience to wake us up to God’s grace. Her mother, Regina, was mystified by her daughter’s unconventional plots: “Do you think that you are really using the talent God gave you when you don’t write something that a lot, a lot, of people like?”

Flannery told a friend her mother’s criticism “leaves me shaking and speechless, and raises my blood pressure 140 degrees, etc.” When her first novel, Wise Blood, was published, Regina was concerned about the book’s effect on a cousin in her 80s, Katie Semmes. Flannery wrote to friends: “My current literary assignment (from Regina) is to write an introduction for Cousin Katie ‘so she won’t be shocked,’ to be pasted on the inside of her book.”

Her advice to aspiring writer friends remains helpful for writers today. In an essay titled “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” she wrote, “The Christian writer particularly will feel that whatever his initial gift is, it comes from God.” She believed there is a mysterious element in the talents God gives us. For example, Flannery had a knack for describing grotesque characters and fashioning shocking plot twists. She told a friend, “One writes what one can.”

Both Time magazine and the Atlanta newspaper were harshly critical of A Good Man Is Hard to Find, a story in which a grandmother has her moment of grace right before she dies at the hands of an escaped convict. Still, this criticism didn’t slow Flannery down. Instead, she shared the negative comments with her friends to assure them that bleak reviews should not derail their projects. In her wonderfully dry manner, she commented about the reviewer at the newspaper, who usually wrote about gardening. “They shouldn’t have taken her away from the petunias.”

Flannery took her talent seriously and sacrificed many activities in favor of writing. As she put it, “There is a great deal that has to either be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.” In her case, she was stricken with lupus at age 25, which greatly curtailed her activities. She had to give up dreams of living independently and content herself with living with her mother on a remote dairy farm outside the small Georgia town of Milledgeville.

“I can with one eye squinted see it all as a blessing,” she wrote in a letter.

This can be a hard statement to understand until we realize her illness underscored for her how precious time is. She only had energy to write fiction two hours a day, so she committed herself to this time.

Flannery believed a fixed routine is a way to nurture inspiration. In giving advice to writer Cecil Dawkins, Flannery suggested she should devote three hours each morning to writing, and this didn’t mean reading or doing anything else. Today, Flannery might advise against scrolling through social-media posts and answering emails. “No nothing, but you sit there,” she warned.

She was also adamant about eliminating distractions. She wrote on a typewriter sitting on “a large ugly brown desk” with its back to the window, so she would miss the antics of the peacocks and donkeys cavorting outside. When Regina attempted to decorate her daughter’s room by adding curtains, Flannery demanded they be removed “lest they ruin my prose.”

Writing is a solitary endeavor, but Flannery shared her drafts with friends whose comments she took seriously. In turn, she spent hours reading their manuscripts and offering suggestions. One unpublished fiction writer was Betty Hester, who admitted she had become depressed after someone harshly criticized her efforts.

In reply, Flannery gave excellent advice that could be posted on the walls of writers today: “Any criticism at all which depresses you to the extent that you stop writing is from the Devil and to subject yourself to it is for you an occasion of sin.”

No matter how much her mother might wring her hands over Flannery’s plots, and no matter how harshly critics treated her works, nothing stopped her from writing. She suggested that writers who are fortunate enough to have a book published should not waste time worrying about readers’ reactions.

“When the book is out of your hands, it belongs to God,” she noted. “He may use it to save a few souls or try a few others but I think that for the writer to worry about this is to take over God’s business.”

For Flannery, writing was definitely “God’s business.”

She was a keen believer in the mysterious workings of inspiration. She also believed that talent is a gift from God we are called to nurture. For some it can be writing, and for others it might be painting or sculpting. How blessed we are that Flannery took her own advice and did not let negativity stop her. She might have lived on a remote dairy farm, but Flannery had the ability to shape unforgettable stories with themes that encompass the whole world.