munro compression of ideas

An Inner Bell that Rings: the Craft of Alice Munro
Judith Maclean Miller
The Antigonish Review 115

Munro: What I want to get changes with different stories. It's got to be dictated by the material itself. And sometimes I want to get something that is very grainy and I don't want any artifice at all. I don't want the choice of words to seem anywhere elegant. I want awkwardness. I want to get a kind of plainness. And then I would be doing another story with different material and I want it to be, I feel that it should be, well, lush isn't the word I mean. But there should be a kind of luxuriance. The feeling of the story should be of lots and lots of words and resonance. Things level upon level.

point about the "compression" of this writing, that it has the effects of poem. A person can linger a long time over a paragraph like this in Munro-which becomes like a stanza in a poem. It is part of the effect she says she wants when she invites a reader to enter these stories anywhere and linger in the "rooms" she has created. That cannot happen in a story which is driving itself forward, in one direction, along a plot line. Munro and Metcalf went on to talk further about words:

Metcalf: Would you regard the way that
I respond to that word as being
ridiculous?

Munro: No. No. You just analyse a bit
further than I do. I know that it has
to be that word for some reason that I
don't go into. I'm just satisfied when
I know the word is right.

Metcalf: But when you are writing you
have this extremely conscious care and
choice about finding the exact word for
an exact place within the rhythm?

Munro: Yes. And it isn't so much
exactness in the meaning sense.
It's an emotional exactness ...
an exactness of resonance.

Metcalf. It's deliberate but it's
not conscious. Could we put it
that way?

Munro: Yes, I think so. Sometimes the
word comes right away ... the right word
... you might say it's not deliberate.
But in other cases the word has to be
sought for ... But not sought for in a
dictionary or a thesaurus or anything
like that or not sought for because of
its official meaning. (Metcalf 56)

Metcalf, John. "A Conversation with Alice Munro," Journal of Canadian Fiction. 1.4 (1972): 54-62.