Usually, I have a lot of acquaintance with the story before I start writing it. When I didn't have regular time to give to writing, stories would just be working in my head for so long that when I started to write I was deep into them. Now, I do that work by filling notebooks.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of preparation and the creative process in writing.
Alice Munro reflects on her writing process, highlighting how she often has a deep familiarity with her stories before she begins to write them. She notes that her stories would develop in her mind while she lacked consistent writing time, which now translates into her habit of extensive note-taking to capture her thoughts and ideas.
In practice
In a workshop on writing fiction, this quote could inspire participants to develop their story ideas before diving into the writing process.
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.
Photography is a brief complicity between foresight and luck.
That kill the bloom before its time, And blanch, without the owner's crime, The most resplendent hair.
The beautiful is a phenomenon which is never apparent of itself, but is reflected in a thousand different works of the creator.
I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.
I'm totally crazy, I know that. I don't say that to be a smartass, but I know that that's the very essence of what makes my work good. And I know my work is good. Not everybody likes it, that's fine. I don't do it for everybody. Or anybody. I do it because I can't not do it.
Music is always a commentary on society.
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