August 1922 – I am beginning Greek again, and must really make out some plan: today 28th: Mrs Dalloway finished on Sat. 2nd Sept: Sunday 3rd to Friday 8th start Chaucer: Chaucer – that chapter, I mean, should be finished by Sept. 22nd. And then? Shall I write the next chapter of Mrs. D. – if she is to have a next chapter; and shall it be the prime minister? [At this time, Virginia envisioned what would become Mrs. Dalloway as a set of stories about different attendees at a party] Which will last till the week after we get back – say Oct. 12th. Then I must be ready to start my Greek chapter. So I have from today, 28th to 12th – which is just over 6 weeks – but I must allow for some interruptions.
I’ve quoted the above entry in full as one representative example of a genre that appears throughout the diary: Virginia made careful plans about how she would spend her time and set herself deadlines, which she almost never met.
My own inclination is sometimes to focus on making plans instead of simply getting on with the work. So I’m certainly biased, but it seems Virginia had something of this tendency as well.
Virginia scheduled and rescheduled her time, mapping out the future – calculating how much time a project will take, when she will complete a draft, when she might publish a book or essay – she almost always underestimated how long her work will take!
There are multiple lessons to be drawn from that fact. Even if she never got the timelines exactly right, the fact that Virginia continued to plan out her time in this way indicates that she must have found it useful. Maybe this was because a general sense that her draft might be done in, say, two months, and that she could then turn to another project, was useful even if the dates were slightly off. Maybe she found a balance between pursuing these self-imposed deadlines and letting herself off the hook when she couldn’t reach them. Maybe it was a way to motivate her subconscious; if she knew on some level that she would begin the next chapter of Mrs Dalloway in a few weeks, might she begin to ruminate on what that chapter would be, before she began to actively work on it?
In fact, this is not unlike Virginia’s approach to symbolism and to planning out the shape of her longer works. She had a general sense of when she wanted to finish a project, but she did not let these timelines control her and she was willing to adjust them as circumstances required.
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Joy in the Morning, Betty Smith
Grapefruit, Yoko Ono
Everything in the Universe is Unfinished, Yoko Ono
Berlin, Jason Lutes – I think this represents basically everything that I never want to do with my comics. The best part of this book are very good, but to get to those moments, you have to get through pages and pages of talking heads. It’s not as if I don’t want the book to have any plot, but like a lot of comics that are assumed to be impressive because they took 20 years to make, this feels to me like a solid first draft that could stand to lose 100+ pages.