Headline: Alice Munro Wins Nobel Prize in Literature. Any time a woman wins it is reason to celebrate. And so in honor of Alice Munro, here are seven quotes about the craft of writing that may surprise. I found these in an article in The Week, which began:
On writing short stories:
I don’t really understand a novel. I don’t understand where the excitement is supposed to come in a novel, and I do in a story. There’s a kind of tension that if I’m getting a story right I can feel right away, and I don’t feel that when I try to write a novel. I kind of want a moment that’s explosive, and I want everything gathered into that. [via The New York Times]
On whether she considers herself a feminist writer:
Naturally my stories are about women. I’m a woman. I don’t know what the term is for men who write mostly about men. I’m not always sure what is meant by “feminist.” In the beginning I used to say, well, of course I’m a feminist. But if it means that I follow a kind of feminist theory, or know anything about it, then I’m not. I think I’m a feminist as far as thinking that the experience of women is important. That is really the basis of feminism. [via The Atlantic]
On her influences:
The thing about the Southern writers that interested me, without my being really aware of it, was that all the Southern writers whom I really loved were women. I didn’t really like Faulkner that much. I loved Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Ann Porter, Carson McCullers. There was a feeling that women could write about the freakish, the marginal. [via Paris Review]
On memory:
I have never kept diaries. I just remember a lot and am more self-centered than most people. [via New Yorker]
On revisions:
I’ve often made revisions at that stage that turned out to be mistakes because I wasn’t really in the rhythm of the story anymore. I see a little bit of writing that doesn’t seem to be doing as much work as it should be doing, and right at the end I will sort of rev it up. But when I finally read the story again it seems a bit obtrusive. There should be a point where you say, the way you would with a child, this isn’t mine anymore. [via Paris Review]
On creating convincing characters:
I always have to know my characters in a lot of depth — what clothes they’d choose, what they were like at school, etc. And I know what happened before and what will happen after the part of their lives I’m dealing with. I can’t see them just now, packed into the stress of the moment. So I suppose I want to give as much of them as I can. [via Knopf]
On making sacrifices:
It’s certainly true that when I was young, writing seemed to me so important that I would have sacrificed almost anything to it. Because I thought of the world in which I wrote, the world I created, as somehow much more enormously alive than the world I was actually living in.
As you get older your rampaging need to write diminishes a bit. You have to face the amazing fact that you’re probably going to die, at some time, anyway. So everything you do in your life then seems more relative because it’s just part of your life. [via The Atlantic]
Congratulations to Alice Munro! I’ve read a few of her short stories over the years and really liked them. Was there anything in these quotes that surprised you?
Something that hasn’t been touched on too much with this news: I’m gratified a *short story* writer won. I’ve been hearing forever that the short story genre is unappreciated, considered less of an intellectual accomplishment than the 700-page Jonathan Franzen novel. Deborah Eisenberg, my favorite short story writer, has often said people ask her when she’s going to write that “big,” “important” novel instead of all those little stories, overlooking the fact that she packs more into thirty pages than many do into 700. At the same time, I hear we live in the era of short attention spans, that Twitter rules the roost, that flash fiction–short paragraphs or even 140 character efforts–are the new black. I don’t get that publishers seem to believe people want long yarns when they’re also saying people today have flashbulb attention-spans.
Frankly, I think the length is unimportant–size doesn’t matter! It’s how good it is! 😉 J.K. Rowling saw her first Potter book rejected by almost everybody because no one thought little kids would read a big thick book with no pictures. They did. The subsequent books got even longer. They read them too. I don’t think readers care about genre and format as much as publishers like to think they do. But genre and format help marketers, so they’re here to stay.