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.
The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
To me more dear, congenial to my heart, One native charm, than all the gloss of art.
I don't believe a person has a style. What people have is a way of photographing what is inside them. What is there comes out.
Know what your characters want, know what they need most, know what they fear most, and don't be fearful of facing it, no matter how unpleasant it may be.
I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.
Such labour'd nothings, in so strange a style, Amaze th' unlearn'd and make the learned smile.
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