A
How do you win a Nobel Prize for writing? Here's the secret from a previous winner: make it short, keep it real, and work hard.
Canadian author Alice Munro, 82, was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in literature. She is known for her short stories about personal relationships of ordinary people, usually women.
Munro was born into a farming family in Ontario. The family was very poor. Munro did a lot of physical work as a young girl. She decided to be a writer at the age of 12. Now Munro turns her hard childhood into great writing ideas. The story Dear Life, for example, opens with a description of the neighborhood in which Munro grew up. Also, she talks about her poor relationship with her mother in many of her stories, such as Lives of Girls and Women and Friend of My Youth.
Since she published her first book in 1968, Munro has won many awards, with the Nobel Prize as her biggest honor. But Munro doesn't see herself as a talented(有天赋的) writer.
“I'm the opposite of a writer with a quick gift. I don't grasp it very easily at all, the‘it' being whatever I'm trying to do,” she said.
Do you dream of becoming an author while sadly admitting you are not that talented? Munro has a tip for you: use notebooks and write a lot.
“I have lots of notebooks that contain(包含) this writing,” she said. But it helps her sort out (整理) her mind. “Stories would just be working in my head for so long that when I started to write I was deep into them.”
