Alice Munro recently announced publicly her plan to stop writing. “I’m probably not going to write anymore,” she told a newspaper interviewer in Toronto in June. She has done what she wanted to do with writing. She has an extensive body of work which people read avidly all over the world. She has won numerous literary awards. And, at age eight-one, having survived cancer, coronary bypass surgery, and the death of her second husband, she is understandably tired. It is time to stop, she says.

I have thought so much about what that means to her, and what it is like to give up the activity that has most defined you to yourself and to others. In her own explanations I read between the lines, and I hear ambivalence. That probably for example. Or this: “There is a nice feeling about being just like everyone else now. But it also means that the most important thing in my life is gone.” (New York Times, July 2, 2013)

Munro made a similar claim that she intended to stop writing back in 2006, and then she went on to write and publish her most recent book Dear Life. I suspect she means it this time; she possibly really won’t write another book. But I would also maintain that she won’t stop being a writer. Because a large part of being a writer is viewing the world as a writer does, moving through the days with an eye for odd detail, an ear tuned to the rhythms of dialogue. Being a writer is not solely about getting words onto the page, it is also about a way of living, a habit of converting life’s messiness into stories, told with precise and astutely chosen details.

Seeing the world as a writer is a habit learned not overnight but over years, and because it develops slowly it is deeper than most habits, and I am quite sure it does not depart simply because you tell it to go away.