I want my stories to move people ... to feel some kind of reward from the writing.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the emotional impact stories can have on people, highlighting the reward of connecting through writing.
Alice Munro expresses her desire for her stories to evoke emotions and provoke a response from readers. She believes that storytelling holds the power to resonate with individuals, offering them a sense of fulfillment and connection through the experience of reading.
In practice
In a writing workshop, to inspire your peers about the importance of impactful storytelling.
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.
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.
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.
Your best work is your expression of yourself.
Drawing is . . . not an exercise of particular dexterity, but above all a means of expressing intimate feelings and moods.
When I was younger, I thought I had to shut myself off, work really hard to cry. I learned after a while that that's just not... You know, often in life, you cry when you're caught off-guard. That's where I need to be when I'm acting, too.
Color, even more than drawing, is a means of liberation.
The best way to execute French cooking is to get good and loaded and whack the hell out of a chicken.
Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.
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