Quote #1
Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally, I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
More from Alice Munro
- Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
- I have recently re-read much of Chekhov and it's a humbling experience. I don't even claim Chekhov as an influence because he influenced al…
- I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions…
- I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is…
- In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightfor…
- In twenty years I've never had a day when I didn't have to think about someone else's needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted ar…
- Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.
- Sometimes I read one of my stories, maybe one that I wrote thirty years ago, and I think, Now I'd go and do it differently. Or I think I wo…