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.
When the theater gates open, a mob pours inside, and it is the poet's task to turn it into an audience.
Sometimes photographers mistake emotion for what makes a great street photograph.
The poet must not only write the poem but must scrutinize the world intensely, or anyway that part of the world he or she has taken for subject. If the poem is thin, it is likely so not because the poet does not know enough words, but because he or she has not stood long enough among the flowers--has not seen them in any fresh, exciting, and valid way.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.
A good film demands its own score, and if you are a musician, your conscience will never allow you to do something mediocre for a good film.
Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.
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