Intentionality

Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of The New Yorker, on Alice Munro:

Working with her on the last two dozen or so was both a thrill and a lesson in intentionality. Although her stories seemed to move organically, sometimes even to wander, often when I suggested cutting a passage that I thought was extraneous I had to erase my suggestion when the importance of that passage became manifestly clear a few pages later. Invariably, when I felt that something wasn’t entirely working in a story, she would send me a revision before I’d even had time to talk to her about it.