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.
Interpretation
Anecdotes can be misleading; deeper exploration reveals more profound truths.
In this quote, Alice Munro suggests that the surface simplicity of anecdotes often hides a more complex underlying story. By delving deeper, one can uncover richer narratives that resonate with deeper human experiences and truths beyond mere personal tales.
In practice
In a writing workshop, to emphasize the importance of deeper storytelling, you might say this quote to encourage participants to look beyond surface details.
Sometimes our connection is frayed, it is in danger, it seems almost lost. Views and streets deny knowledge of us, the air grows thin. Wouldn't we rather have a destiny to submit to, than, something that claims us, anything, instead of such flimsy choices, arbitrary days?
I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.
I just believed it easily, the way you might believe and in fact remember that you once had another set of teeth, now vanished but real in spite of that. Until one day, one day when I may even have been in my teens, I knew with a dim sort of hole in my insides that now I didn't believe it anymore.
You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.
A story is not like a road to follow... it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside it altered by being viewed from these windows.
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.
I see music as one language. If one musical form eats its own tail, it dies. So it needs to be a mongrel, it needs to be hybridised.
And I don't consider Broadway the acropolis of theatrical art. I mean Broadway is commercial - that's what it is. It's expensive seats and a lot of them that have to be filled every night. Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway, as far as I'm concerned, is in New York the pride of New York theater.
Robin Williams was an airman, a doctor, a genie, a nanny ... and everything in between. But he was one of a kind.
Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins pursue Irishness as a poetic end, they are merely exploiting incidental local colour.
In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.
A musical is what happens when text collides with motion collides with song collides with spectacle. And spectacle can be the human heart; it doesn't necessarily have to be a helicopter crashing.
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