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.
Interpretation
A story invites exploration and personal interpretation rather than following a straight path.
Alice Munro's quote illustrates the immersive and complex nature of storytelling, likening it to a house where readers can explore various rooms and connections, rather than a linear journey. This metaphor emphasizes the depth and richness of narratives, suggesting that each story offers unique experiences and insights based on individual perspectives.
In practice
In a book club, discussing this quote can deepen the conversation about how different readers interpret the same story.
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.
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.
My ego only needs a good rhythm section
Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.
In architecture the idea degenerated. Design allows a more direct and pleasurable route.
It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.
What lists and awards don't measure - and I feel this strongly - is the lasting value of any work of art. They're a snapshot of a moment, and one should always consider their judgments in that context.
When I see a story, I ask: is this something I'd like to be in? Is this something I'd like to see? And if I'd like to see it, would I like to tell it?
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