Alice Munro Quotes

I try to let go of the intellect and just tell the story. I only read the page I have in front of me on the screen. Then when the whole story is told, I print it, wait a week and read it.

The second draft is on yellow paper, that's when I work on characterizations. The third is pink, I work on story motivations. Then blue, that's where I cut, cut, cut.

When I'm writing the first draft, I'm writing in a very slovenly way: anything to get the outline of the story on paper.

In general, when I'm writing, I concentrate on the story itself, and I leave it to other people, such as agents and publishers, to work out who it's for.

I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.

I have a manuscript that I'm almost done with, but I've been saying that forever. I'm on what I think will be the second-to-last chapter. It's a story about chance and coincidence.

When I write a novel, every word is mine. I welcome suggestions from my editor, but in the end, I make all the final decisions.

I write easily, let's put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they're doing. And I'm a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.

No, absolutely not, writing doesn't have to be like a jigsaw puzzle, it can be a very linear undertaking.

I get the beginning. I get the end. Then I write the middle. That's how I do it.

There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don't know any of these writers.

When I'm happiest writing is just not knowing where it goes and just let the characters bring you there.

Sequencing - the careful striptease by which you reveal information to the reader - matters in an article, but it is absolutely essential to a book.

I generally write a first draft that's pretty lean. Just get the story down.

I am a very linear thinker, so I write beginning to end. I write hundreds of pages per book that never make it into print.

A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions, or the occasional superfluous paragraph.

With 'Broken Harbour,' a third of the way through, I worked it out and had to go back and bloody rewrite.

I think a lot of the dull parts of first drafts come from a kind of over-managing, intrusive writer who wants to direct traffic. The idea of taking out the parts that the reader could infer is very liberating, and it's weirdly part of radicalizing your work: it allows you to go to new places fast.

The most joyful part of writing, for me, is when I am 90% there, and suddenly the story clicks into place, and things finally start to make sense.

For me, writing is a part of directing. It's the first stage of directing.

I've learned to really love revision over the years and worked hard to build up my craft muscle to make my revisions less and less painful with each book.

I tend to lean toward romance, characters, and relationships when I write, so I have to add to the setting elements and world-building when I revise.

As an author, you think you know where the good parts and the bad parts are. And then you read to a group of children, and you learn when you're boring them, and you hurry through those sections to get to the parts where they're interested again. You start to get a sense of your story's rhythm and flow.

Once you have found the right shot to introduce the scene-written your first declarative sentence-then the rest flows. You've found the key to the whole scene.

Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.