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About this quote

What does it mean?
Munro clarifies that while her stories are not literal memoirs, they draw deeply from personal knowledge and feeling.
In plain terms
Her stories are not autobiographical but are based on what she knows personally.
What can you take from it?
Fiction often stems from personal truth rather than factual biography.

Where it applies

  • writing fiction
  • reflecting on experience
  • interpreting memory

Putting it to work

  • draw from personal feeling
  • distinguish fact from truth

Questions to consider

  • How much of your writing comes from personal feeling?

Another view

Readers may still confuse personal resonance with factual autobiography.

More from Alice Munro

  1. The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.

    Permalink to quote #10
  2. When I'm doing the first draft, I have a so-much-a-day schedule. But when I start putting it on the computer I can get carried away, and I try to go as far as …

    Permalink to quote #12
  3. 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 would just alter a phr…

    Permalink to quote #9

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