The importance of looking out of the window

Canadian Alice Munro is one of the best short story writers in the world. That is an indisputable fact. My friend Anna Horsley has already won a major writing award (the Adam Prize) for the manuscript of her short story collection but has yet to publish a book. Both writers share a common activity: staring out of windows.

Anna calls it 'work'. She says it is as much work as the act of sitting typing stories onto her laptop. She says writing requires thinking time and staring out of windows is part of that. Windows are good for observing people too.

One day recently - free of the usual obligations she has as a creative writing tutor - Anna said she stared out of the window all day. She explained to me that Alice Munro recommends it.

Later she sent me a link to brainyquote.com which has quotes by Munro including this one:

I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

As a writer with a family to bring up and tutor responsibilities, too, I sometimes feel guilty about the amount of time I spend apparently doing nothing. I realise now, though, that the brain needs uncommitted time to sift and order things if it's going to serve up stories. More importantly it needs to free-fall sometimes.

It also needs unfettered time to observe the world going by.

So I try now to look out of windows without feeling guilty (and to stop justifying the lack of bridge and tennis...) Here's Alice again:

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.

Which is one reason, apparently, why she wrote short stories rather than novels. With three children to bring up, Munro wrote when she could and spent 20 years putting together her first collection of stories. Dance of the Happy Shades was published when she was 37 in 1968.

Since then she's published another dozen books including her memoir-based novel The View from Castle Rock and now, in her late 70s, has quit writing. Which is terrible news for all those fans like me and Anna who thirst for her work.

I remember reading one of Munro's stories in Runaway while I was writing The Blue and it showing me suddenly and simply how to write about love in a way that was unsentimental, visceral, raw, astonishing. Munro says,

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens.

And here's a review in the International Herald Tribune which tries to come to grips with why Munro is so good - and, I suppose, why looking out the window works. It starts by saying she is a writer of 'unsurpassable distinctions.'

The distinctions that Munro has been elaborating on for years along the prairies, small towns, and modest lives of Canada operate upon the heart. They are particle metaphysics, and their collisions release an energy that all but mutates the reader's mental and emotional genes.
Afterward, we glow faintly in the dark.
Heart is a word dangerously subject to sentimental abuse; even worse is heartstrings. Useful, though, in attempting to suggest the nature of Munro's art. She moves on a fine workaday surface; then, unsignaled, reaches deep with delicate and knowing fingers to tug the filament of a brainily targeted emotion. Her unremarkable landscapes are dotted with rabbit holes; falling in, we grow, we shrink, we are at a loss, and then unexpectedly found.