I’ve written a few times over the past several months about Virigina Woolf quotes that have been helpful to me. I’m no2 beginning some early work towards what I think will be a zine about what cartoonists can learn from Virginia Woolf’s process and thoughts about her own work. She was a micropublisher! She only sold a few hundred copies of her early books! So her perspective has some interesting relationships with the world of small press comics, in addition to its overall insight.
Here’s a quote:
It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly on beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. The one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of a impending shape keep one at it more than anything. I’m a little anxious.
There is obvious comfort here in seeing an artist struggle through the challenges and even the boredom of creating work that we now see as successful. But one line is more subtly interesting: “The sense of an impending shape keeps one at it more than anything.” This suggests that a vague sense of a book’s goals can be a motivator and a guiding light. Note that Woolf doesn’t say “a specific plot” or “an exact knowledge of what the book means.” But she also implies that complete ignorance of what you are working towards is unhelpful.
Note that like all of us, Woolf could be fickle and self-critical when talking about her own approach. A few months after the quote above, she writes:
I began to wonder what it is that I am doing: to suspect, as is usual in such cases, that I have not thought my plan out plainly enough — so to dwindle, niggle, hesitate — which means that one’s lost.
So it’s a difficult balance: thinking though a plan, but not thinking through it too much.
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Pickle #1-2, Dylan Horrocks
The Diary of Virginia Woolf Vol. 1, ed. Anne Olivier Bell
The Diary of Virginia Woolf Vol. 5, ed. Anne Olivier Bell
The Journey Not the Arrival Matters, Leonard Woolf
An American Marriage, Tayari Jones