Is a Story like a Road or a House?
“A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house.
You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows.
And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished.
You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time.
It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.”
Is a story a road or a house?
I love this quote by Alice Munro, and the languid, cozy imagery of a story full of rooms and windows, where you can visit or even live.
That doesn't mean I agree with it completely. Some stories--perhaps most stories--are Journeys. The character starts in one place and ends in another, as if she had travelled along a road.
And of course plenty of stories, especially fantasy and science fiction stories, indeed follow the characters traipsing down a road, across a map of fascinating places, meeting new people and fighting monster along the way.
It's not that you can't live in such stories, but they require more room than a house. To live in such stories is to enter into an entirely new world, with rooms the size of kingdoms and wells as deep as an imagined calendar of eons.
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