"I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me"
About this Quote
Astonishment, for Munro, isn't a plot twist you can summarize at a dinner party; it's a slow recalibration of perception. When she dismisses the "what happens", she's not being coy about story structure so much as insisting that events are rarely the main event. Life, in her work, is a chain of minor collisions - a look held too long, a phone call delayed, a remembered humiliation - that only later reveals its consequences. The shock is retrospective: you finish a Munro story and realize your emotional math has been quietly redone.
Her phrase "the way everything happens" signals craft as ethics. Munro treats causality as messy, partly hidden, often domestic. She honors the truth that people don't experience their own lives in clean arcs; they experience them in overlapping scenes, with motives that arrive late and explanations that never fully land. "Astonishing" becomes a feeling produced by attention: the prose lingers where conventional narratives would cut, and that lingering creates its own suspense.
"These long short story fictions" is also a manifesto disguised as a preference. Munro staked her career against the prestige economy that treats the novel as the serious form. Her hybrid length gives her room for time jumps, social detail, and psychological aftershocks while preserving the short story's compression and ruthlessness. Context matters here: writing from small-town Canada, often about women boxed in by manners and circumstance, Munro found a form that could hold the ordinary until it turned strange - not by changing the facts, but by changing the angle of seeing.
Her phrase "the way everything happens" signals craft as ethics. Munro treats causality as messy, partly hidden, often domestic. She honors the truth that people don't experience their own lives in clean arcs; they experience them in overlapping scenes, with motives that arrive late and explanations that never fully land. "Astonishing" becomes a feeling produced by attention: the prose lingers where conventional narratives would cut, and that lingering creates its own suspense.
"These long short story fictions" is also a manifesto disguised as a preference. Munro staked her career against the prestige economy that treats the novel as the serious form. Her hybrid length gives her room for time jumps, social detail, and psychological aftershocks while preserving the short story's compression and ruthlessness. Context matters here: writing from small-town Canada, often about women boxed in by manners and circumstance, Munro found a form that could hold the ordinary until it turned strange - not by changing the facts, but by changing the angle of seeing.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Alice Munro interview, "The Art of Fiction No. 137" (The Paris Review, 1999) — Munro discusses wanting readers to feel "something is astonishing" and praises "long short story fictions." |
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