I am reading Flannery O'Connor's letters. My favourite is a letter she wrote to Eileen Hall on March 10, 1956. Here is a large part of it.
“When I first began to write I was much worried about this thing of scandalizing people, as I fancied that what I wrote was highly inflammatory. I was wrong - it wouldn’t even have kept anybody awake, but anyway, thinking this was my problem, I talked to a priest about it. The first thing he said was, “You don’t have to write for fifteen year old girls.” Of course, the mind of a fifteen year old girl lurks in many a head that is seventy-five and people are every day being scandalized not only by what is scandalous of its nature but by what is not. If a novelist wrote a book about Abraham passing his wife Sarah off as his sister - which he did - and allowing her to be taken over by those who wanted her for their lustful purposes - which he did to save his skin - how many Catholics would not be scandalized at the behavior of Abraham? The fact is that in order not to be scandalized, one has to have a whole view of things, which not many of us have.
This is a problem that has concerned Mauriac very much and he wrote a book about it called, “God and Mammon.” His conclusion was that all the novelist could do was “purify the source” - his mind. A young man had written Mauriac a letter saying that as a result of reading one of his novels, he had almost committed suicide. It almost paralyzed Mauriac. At the same time, he was not responsible for the lack of maturity in the boy’s mind and there were doubtless other souls who were profiting from his books. When you write a novel, if you have been honest about it and if your conscience is clear, then it seems to me that you have to leave the rest in God’s hands. When the book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. 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.”