Alice Munro, Nobel Prize short-story writer, in Paris Review interview, said she is incapable of writing novels: Why can’t this great writer write novels?

“…I tried to make it a regular novel…I saw it wasn’t working. It didn’t feel right to me, and I thought I would have to abandon it…Then it came to me that what I had to do was pull it apart and put it in the story form. Then I could handle it. That’s when I learned that I was never going to write a real novel because I could not think that way…

“…I have all these disconnected realities in my own life, and I see them in other people’s lives. That was one of the problems—why I couldn’t write novels, I never saw things hanging together any too well” (1).

I just read the title story of Munro’s Runaway (2). The story is so packed with issues that it reads like a summary of, or a proposal for, a whole novel. Most fiction writers, who write both novels and short stories, could have made it into a novel. Why is a great writer like Munro incapable of doing so?

In her Paris Review interview, Munro makes two passing remarks about her writing process that may be relevant here:

“I’m the opposite of a writer with a quick gift, you know, someone who gets it piped in.”

“I don’t think I have this overwhelming thing that comes in and dictates to me.”

She is acknowledging that those kinds of things do happen with other writers, but not with her. What is it that they experience, but that she doesn’t?

Ninety percent of fiction writers experience their characters as having independent agency, minds of their own (search “Marjorie Taylor” for reference to her study). Most fiction writers experience things coming to them that they, themselves, seemingly, hadn’t thought of.

Such a creative process involves multiple personality, since psychological entities, including characters, narrators, and muses, named and unnamed, who have minds of their own, are alternate personalities.

It is possible that Alice Munro is among the ten percent of fiction writers who do not have multiple personality trait. They, too, can win the Nobel Prize. (I have discussed literally dozens of Nobel Prize in Literature winners who have had multiple personality trait.)

[But search "Alice Munro" and see two subsequent posts that retract this hypothesis.]

1. Jeanne McCulloch, Mona Simpson (interviewers). “Alice Munro: The Art of Fiction” [1994]. In The Paris Review Interviews, II. New York, Picador, 2007.

2. Alice Munro. Runaway (Stories). New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.