Tuesday, November 04, 2008

A Story Is Like A House


I found this old photograph of the house where I grew up in Chicago about the same time I stumbled upon this amazing decription of what writing feels like inside your soul. It comes from Alice Munro. I wanted to share her words with you. "I've got to make, I've got to build up, a house, a story to fit around the indescribable 'feeling' that is like the soul of a story. I'm very, very excited by what you might call the surface of life, ...in a way I can't analyze or describe. I never intended to be a short-story writer. I started writing them because I didn't have time to write anything else - I had three children. And I got used to writing stories, so I saw my material that way. There's a kind of tension that if I'm getting a story right. I kind of want a moment that's explosive, and I wanted everything gathered into that." If you want to read one of her short stories set in rural Ohio, I suggest a look at the one entitled, BOYS AND GIRLS.

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