Alice Munro's short stories read as if they were carved rather than typed, and that's close to how she made them. She drafted in longhand, then moved to a typewriter and rewrote until the shape felt right. Some stories she was still revising decades after they first appeared.
Longhand First, Then the Keys
When the Paris Review visited her in the mid-1990s, Munro was working at a small table in a dining room lined floor to ceiling with books, on a manual typewriter. She had started using a computer about a year earlier, but her habit was to write one or two drafts by hand before she ever went to the keyboard. The slow, physical version of a draft came first.
Draft After Draft
Munro rarely got a story right early. She described herself as the opposite of a writer with a quick gift, someone who got onto the wrong track and had to haul herself back. Her biographers and editors describe a tireless self-editor: she reportedly wrote eight versions of the story Powers, and she kept returning to finished work, expanding Wood from three sections to eight and publishing more than one version of stories like Save the Reaper and Passion.
She thought of a story less as a line to follow and more as a structure to move through, a space she built up around a feeling she was chasing. That's part of why the revising went on so long. She was reshaping rooms, not just sentences.
There should be a point where you say, the way you would with a child, this isn't mine anymore.
Alice Munro, The Paris Review, 1994
For the daily habits behind the process, see the full Alice Munro writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- Draft by hand first. Munro let a slow longhand pass do the thinking before she typed.
- Expect to be wrong early. She assumed the first track would be the wrong one and planned to double back.
- Revise like an architect. Treat a story as a structure you reshape, not a sentence you polish.
- Know when to stop. At some point the story stops being yours to fix.