Munro: ...This whole process might take up to a week, the time of trying to think it through, trying to retrieve it, then giving it up and thinking about something else, and then getting it back, usually quite unexpectedly, when I'm in the grocery store or out for a drive. I'll think, Oh well, I have to do it from the point of view of so-and-so, and I have to cut this character out, and of course these people are not married, or whatever. The big change, which is usually the radical change.
Interviewer: That makes the story work?
Munro: I don't even know if it makes the story better. What it does is make it possible for me to continue to write. That's what I mean by saying I don't think I have this overwhelming thing that comes in and dictates to me. I only seem to get a grasp on what I want to write about with the greatest difficulty. And barely.
Alice Munro, The Art of Fiction No. 137, 1994 interviewed by Jeanne McCulloch and Mona Simpson, in Women At Work Vol. II, Interviews from the Paris Review
Interviewer: That makes the story work?
Munro: I don't even know if it makes the story better. What it does is make it possible for me to continue to write. That's what I mean by saying I don't think I have this overwhelming thing that comes in and dictates to me. I only seem to get a grasp on what I want to write about with the greatest difficulty. And barely.
Alice Munro, The Art of Fiction No. 137, 1994 interviewed by Jeanne McCulloch and Mona Simpson, in Women At Work Vol. II, Interviews from the Paris Review
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