Some of the stories I admire seem to zero in on one particular time and place. There isn't a rule about this. But there's a tidy sense about many stories I read. In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.
More Quotes by Alice Munro
The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.
Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.
Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.
I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don't obey the rules of progression for novels. I don't think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let's say a chunk of fiction.
In twenty years I've never had a day when I didn't have to think about someone else's needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it.
'The New Yorker' was really my first experience with serious editing. Previously, I'd more or less just had copyediting with a few suggestions - not much.