Probably the greatest writer’s crush I have ever had on anyone has been on Virginia Woolf. She combines a poetic sensibility with a modern point of view; she celebrates the small moments in life by painting with a very large brush. All of her novels are basically explorations of the same extended metaphor, the tide of life coming in and going out. Only strong characters, or characters who can find that strength within themselves, can survive. And throughout all of life’s joyful moments run the undercurrents of sadness, tragedy and death.
Writing students today are taught to write as directly, as concretely as possible. This gets the point across, certainly, and I suppose it helps sell more books to a wider audience, but my problem is that tends to eliminate the poetic vision of life. When we are told to use concrete words over ethereal ones, or when we are told to avoid unnecessarily complex sentence construction, we are making our work easier to read, and less prone to error, but we may be cutting out the potential for greatness. For many years I wanted to emulate Virginia Woolf’s style because I felt it came closest to poetry in the modern novel of almost any other author.
Another reason I have fallen for her writing so hard is that there is so much of it on so many levels to enjoy: novels, short stories, essays, literary criticisms, social critiques, five volumes of diaries, six volumes of letters, and on and on. Getting all of these views, from the most publicly polished to the most personal, helps you to understand this particular creative mind at work. While her novels play with the size of the frame and scale of the story, her diaries and letters show a relatively grounded view of an intelligent and creative mind.
My Favorite Virginia Woolf Quotes:
“We have proved, sitting eating, sitting talking, that we can add to the treasury of moments. We are not slaves bound to suffer incessantly unrecorded petty blows on our bent backs. We are not sheep either, following a master. We are creators. We too have made something that will join the innumerable congregations of past time. We too, as we put on our hats and push open the door, stride not into chaos, but into a world that our own force can subjugate and make part of the illumined and everlasting road.” The Waves (1931)
“…for what could be more serious than the love of a man for woman, what more commanding, more impressive, bearing in its bosom the seeds of death; at the same time these lovers, these people entering into the illusion glittering eyed, must be danced round with mockery, decorated with garlands.” To the Lighthouse, “The Window” (1927)
“In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and it is often only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. Of the complications and confusions which thus result every one has experience….” Orlando (1928)
“What more fitting than to destroy an old word, a vicious and corrupt word that has done much harm in its day and is now obsolete? The word ‘feminist’ is the word indicated. That word, according to the dictionary, means ‘one who champions the rights of women.’ Since the only right, the right to earn a living, has been won, the word no longer has meaning. And a word without meaning is a dead word, a corrupt word. Let us therefore celebrate this occasion by cremating a corpse.” Three Guineas (1938)
“I believe, that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can’t cross: that its to be pulled through only in breathless anguish. Now when I sit down to write an article, I have a net of words which will come down on the idea certainly in an hour or so. But a novel, as I say, to be good should seem, before one writes it, something unwriteable: but only visible; so that for nine months one lives in despair, and only when one has forgotten what one meant, does the book seem toerable. I assure you, all my novels were first rate before they were written.” Letter to Vita Sackville West, 9/8/1928