Writing Advice From Alice Munro
Writing is hard work. There’s the agony of the blank page, the struggle to find the right words, vacillating between feeling like a genius and feeling like a hack. As a salve writers often look to those who are more seasoned for advice that will help ease the struggle, or at the very least help put the struggle in context.
Alice Munro’s story “Royal Beatings” sealed my fate as a short story writer. Sure, a story about a little girl’s violent and tumultuous relationship with her stepmother doesn’t seem like the kind of tale you’d necessarily want to be inspired by, but Munro painted such a gritty, grey picture of Depression-era Canada that was so alive in its pallidness, that I was taken.
Alice Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013. She’s the author of over thirteen short story collections and has received a staggering number of awards including an O. Henry Award, and a PEN/Malamud Award (in case winning a Nobel Prize wasn’t a big enough deal). In 2014 Canada put her face on a silver coin and in 2015, the Canada Post honored her by putting her image on a postage stamp.
There’s a lot to learn from her and while my list is by no means comprehensive, below are four timeless pieces of advice from Alice Munro.
Write When You Can
Many authors with last names you know are on the record as stating that to be a good writer you must write every day. They’re quite emphatic about it. For some folks this kind of advice offers structure and discipline. For me, it causes anxiety. I don’t go for dogmatic writing advice of this sort, preferring instead to lean in toward advice that feels open, like a suggestion.
Munro, much like Toni Morrison wrote in the morning before her children woke up. Ursula K. LeGuin wrote after her children went to bed. Women writers, particularly those with children, find moments throughout their day for their writing. But I don’t think you have to be a parent to find this advice useful. Unless you’re a writer with a big fat advance, you don’t have oodles of time for your writing. You’re either bi-vocational, working and hustling and making a living while writing on the side, or if you’re a working writer, you’re assembling blog posts, social media content, you’re struggling to stay on top of your TBR pile, looking for freelance work, and doing said freelance work.
Munro’s advice is an invitation to step away from “should-ing” all over yourself. It’s an invitation for grace. Write when you can. Write in the morning if you’ve got the time, write on the bus, write in the middle of the night. For me, this advice has offered me reprieve. If I can’t write for a couple of days, I write the next day. I write when I can.
Start With The Feeling
Munro is famous for saying that a story isn’t a road you travel down, it’s more like a house. She explains,
Everybody knows what a house does, how it encloses space and makes connections between one enclosed space and another and presents what is outside in a new way… So when I write a story I want to make a certain kind of structure, and I know the feeling I want to get from being inside that structure… There is no blueprint for the structure… I’ve got to make, to build up, a house, a story, to fit around the indescribable ‘feeling’ that is the soul of the story.
As a former professor, I often start my stories by asking what the lesson is that I’m trying to teach or what’s the issue I’m trying to address. But as it turns out, those are the wrong questions to ask as they often lead to heavy-handed stories, houses that feel like the walls are closing in on you.
Munro’s stories feel like houses that you want to spend time in. You want to move from room to room, looking at the furniture, and noticing the sound of the squeaky floorboards. There’s texture and smell and it’s likely because she’s started with asking, What’s the feeling I want my reader to have in this house?
Find The Secret Scene
Once you’ve figured out the feeling you want to conjure, you may think that your next step is to figure out what the story is about. Actually, Munro says there’s usually a scene that captures the essence of the story and that scene may not come close to being what the story is “about.” It’s the scene that can’t be left out without the story feeling empty. She calls this scene “the secret of the story.” She says
“Open Secrets” is “about” a girl who disappears on an overnight camping trip, and the ripples set up in the community by her disappearance. There you have the central incident, the “what happens” of the story. But the scene that I could not do without, the scene that seems to hold the most essential key to the story (but not necessarily to the plot), is the one in the backyard, with the dog.
This is tricky to do but when done with thought and intention, it can mean the difference between a story that seems flat, and one that has depth and weight. Munro states that often the secret scene is one that’s there from the beginning, not forced into the story later. It’s discovered as one invents the story itself. It is found in the process.
Be Willing To Work Through Mistakes
Finishing a story can bring relief. You’re done, right? Well, actually, no. Once you’ve “finished” you’ve only just begun.
Munro has thoughts about what happens once your first draft “has put on rough but adequate clothes.” It’s dressed, sure, but now you need to stand back and take a look at its outfit. It’s in this stage of adjusting, tightening, taking in and letting out here and there, that your story runs the risk of losing its life. The danger she says is that you come to see it as so “hopelessly misbegotten” that the only way to save it is to throw it out altogether.
Munro says that pushing through isn’t the right way, it’s the way to the right way. In other words, in playing with it you may write new pages, seek out new angles, bring minor characters forward, then move them back. See and play with all the mistakes. But you must be willing to continue moving forward because in moving through the mistakes, you’ll find your story’s sense of self.
If you’ve not had a chance to explore Munro’s work, good places to start are Selected Stories and Family Furnishings: Selected Stories 1995-2014.
