Excerpts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf
(Also available as a PDF, if you prefer)
CONTENTS
ON CRITICS, CRITICISM, AND FAME
QUOTES THAT NEED NO COMMENTARY, BECAUSE THEY ARE SO SELF-EVIDENTLY RELEVANT TO COMICS
AN INTRODUCTION
Here are some reasons why Virginia Woolf’s diary is valuable for anyone making art: it documents, over decades, the greatest achievements and deepest insecurities of a unique author. It contains not only specific quotes about process and schedule, but also broader musing about the creative process that can mean different things to different readers – or to the same reader at different times. It is encouraging, inspiring, and directly relevant today even though or perhaps because it was written nearly one hundred years ago.
This document collects a set of quotes from that diary, which she kept for a large chunk of her life, interspersed with some commentary and context, intended to offer practical advice and pose tangible questions that might help you, and me, think more carefully about the art we make and the life we construct while making our art. I make comics, so I’m writing with that particular perspective in mind, but maybe this will be useful to people doing other kinds of creative work.
The value of Virginia’s diary as a creative guide is not my original insight. This is made clear by A Writer’s Diary, the single volume edited by her husband, Leonard Woolf, that excerpted diary entries focused on Virginia’s writing (I refer to her here and going forward by first name for clarity, and also to remind us that she was a real person and not just an infallible literary giant). I recommend that book over this essay if you think you’ll benefit most from reading Virginia in her own words, and some of the excerpts I’ve chosen are also available in that volume. But A Writer’s Diary does imply an artificial distinction between Virginia’s writing and Virginia’s life.
You could also read the five published volumes that collect Virginia’s full diary. I recommend it. But that is a significant undertaking, and this document is shorter. I’ve also organized these quotes by topic, so it could be useful to reference the sections that are specific to whatever might be on your mind.
Here are some reasons why Virginia Woolf’s diary for valuable to cartoonists, specifically: she began her creative life as a small press creator and publisher, as co-founder with Leonard of the Hogarth Press. The first publications of the Press were limited to a few hundred copies and were printed and bound in the Woolfs’ home. Sound familiar? Even some of Virginia’s mid-career works were not as widely available as you might assume; the first printing of Mrs. Dalloway was 2000 copies. Virginia also made a living as a journalist, not a novelist, for a significant portion of her career. So she thinks carefully in her diary about how to divide her time and attention between her paying work and her art.
I’ve made a few very minimal edits to the text of the diary, for instance adding punctuation, with the thought that this document is aimed at readability and ease of use. Otherwise, I have quoted directly from the excellent, five volume Diary of Virginia Woolf edited by Anne Olivier Bell. These books are fairly easy to find; a fun project if you like browsing used bookstores. Within each section, quotes are organized chronologically, because it is useful and interesting to see how Virginia’s thoughts evolve over time. I also include a few quotes from other relevant sources, such as Leonard’s autobiography or Virginia’s letters. The sources are noted directly before the quote in those cases.
A final note, before we begin: I don’t plan to discuss the manner of Virginia’s death beyond this paragraph, because I don’t feel it is relevant. I disagree firmly and without reservation with claims that Virginia’s mental health struggles made her a great writer. Biographers including Virginia’s own nephew, Quentin Bell, have claimed that Virginia’s weeks in bed, often with severe headaches and at her lowest mental points, were an important part of her creative process. But other circumstances, such as her long walks, were just as useful to her as opportunities for quiet contemplation. Plus, of course, she almost always couldn’t do any writing while bedridden. In other words, neither Virginia’s death nor the mental illness that led to it should be romanticized in any way. That illness was not essential to her creative process. It does not invalidate her thoughts about the value and beauty of life. This has been written about at length in many places so I won’t rehash those arguments here. Of course, Virginia’s mental health was an important part of her life, and it can be helpful to read about how she works through those issues. So there are some references to her struggles in the pages that follow.
ON NOT WRITING
July 1918 – I can’t fill up the lost days, thought it is safe to attribute much space in them to printing. The title page was finally done on Sunday. Now I’m in the fury of folding and stapling, so as to have all ready for glueing and sending out tomorrow and Thursday. By rights these processes should be dull; but it’s always possible to devise some little skill or economy, and the pleasure of profiting by them keeps one content.
That description should sound familiar to any cartoonist reading this. This entry is the first of many times that Virginia describes the time she spent working on the Hogarth Press as useful to her writing. Both the physicality of the work, which let her mind wander, and the fact that it led to the production of tangible objects, seem to have been important.
While the specifics varied, Virginia generally did not spend more than a few hours per day on her personal work. At times, this was due to the obligations of paying work, but she also filled her time with long walks, reading, a vibrant social life, regular vacations, and of course the Hogarth Press. She seemed to feel that an increase in the number of hours she spent on her novels would not necessarily lead to an increase in productivity – indeed, at times she indicated that after those few hours the quality of her writing began to decrease.
April 1921 – I think the only prescription for me is to have a thousand interests – if one is damaged, to be able instantly to let my energy flow into Russian, or Greek, or the press, or the garden, or people, or some activity disconnected from my own writing.
December 1924 – I enjoy my printing afternoons, and think it the sanest way of life – for if I were always writing, or merely recouping from writing, I should be like an inbreeding rabbit – my progeny weakly becoming albinos.
Here, Virginia more directly asserts that full days spent writing would be unproductive, and she also seems to have a sense of how long she could write while maintaining a high standard. That sense was presumably built up over time and through a few missteps – some recorded in her diary – when she may have forced herself to write more than was necessary. Scheduled tasks (“my printing afternoons”) seem to have kept her from overindulging too often.
The idea that “recouping from writing” was not really time away from writing is also interesting. Virginia described some of her most challenging pieces of writing, such as the ending of The Waves, as physically and emotionally exhausting in a way that would obviously require recovery. But I read this passage as saying this even an uneventful few hours of writing might require a period of decompression, and that we shouldn’t see that decompression as wasted time, or time away from art.
November 1936 – On Sunday I started to read the proofs [of The Years]. When I had read to the end of the first section I was in despair: stony but convinced despair. I made myself yesterday read on to Present Time. When I reached that landmark I said This is happily so bad that there can be no question about it. I must carry the proofs, like a dead cat, to L[eonard] and tell him to burn them unread. This I did. And a weight fell off my shoulders. That is true. I felt relieved of some great pack. It was cold and dry and very grey and I went out and walked through the graveyard with Cromwell’s daughter’s Tomb down through Grays Inn along Holborn and so back. Now I was no longer Virginia, the genius, but only a perfectly insignificant yet content – shall I call it a spirit? A body? And very tired. Very old. But at the same time content to join these 100 years with Leonard.
This was a particularly bad instance of a common pattern: Virginia would finish a novel and fall into despair in the period before it was published, convinced that it was a failure. With time, her diary became a comfort because it let her look back at previous moments of despair and remember that they had passed. However, importantly, this did not keep the feelings of failure at bay entirely as she completed each new book.
I also quote this passage for a wider point: when might it be useful to engage in a thought experiment about what our lives would be like if we didn’t make art? How should we feel if, like Virginia in this moment, that prospect feels like a weight off our shoulders?
There were days and weeks when Virginia didn’t write at all – at times due to mental health, but also because of social obligations or when she was traveling with Leonard. I wonder if that time away from art made her more eager to return to it when she was ready. I wonder if they that would be the case for me or for you.
ON WHEN TO WRITE
August 1922 – The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think literature can be produced from the raw.
For Virginia, good literature likely means the works she read many times – Shakespeare, the Greeks – rather than her contemporaries. She was a careful student of these works. But even if that’s not what she had in mind here, the important point is that Virginia was a diligent reader throughout her life. Does that approach work for everyone? Some people try to stay away from unwanted influences, or simply stop consuming other media at all, when at an important stage of a creative project. But this was never Virginia’s approach.
“Rocking oneself back into writing” also implies to me an act of synthesizing excitement, of building up your own eagerness to make work by reading or viewing the work that has inspired you before.
The “gentle exercise in the air” is also an important step here. Virginia enjoyed walks, either alone or with Leonard, for most of her life. I imagine this was a chance for her to breathe, to suck in the air of the world.
September 1928 – And when, I wonder, shall I begin, The Moths? Not until I am pressed into it by those insects themselves. Nor have I any notion what it is to be like – a completely new attempt I think. So I always think.
The Moths is an early title for the book that eventually became The Waves. Virginia wrote about potential projects in her diary for months or year before beginning them. Sometimes she tried to articulate to herself how a work might feel, or how it might be different from what had come before. Here, however, she simply recognizes that she isn’t ready. The ideas in her mind need more time to percolate.
How can we decide when is the right time to begin a project we have thought about for years? How, exactly, does it feel to be pressed into a work by the ideas or images buzzing in our heads? Can we get better at identifying that feeling and deciding when to being, or should we resist for as long as possible, until the idea of not beginning the project becomes simply unthinkable?
June 1929 – The only way to keep afloat is by working.
This is obviously excerpted from a longer entry, but this sentence is the key point and a conclusion that Virginia reached in many moments of hesitation or self-doubt. She believed consistently in the power of consistent work. Though we should remember that, for her, this rarely meant working sixteen hour days or rushing to meet an arbitrary deadline – in fact, see ON PLANNING AND SCHEDULING for a discussion of how Virginia rarely met the deadlines she set for herself.
November 1929 – Yesterday I had conviction; it has gone today. Yet I have written 66 pages in the past month.
Work accumulates. Working consistently may not mean working every day. Periods of low energy are natural and it may not be the right choice to ignore those feelings in a push towards a daily word count or weekly page count.
May 1931 – I do seven or eight daily [typed pages of The Waves, from a longhand draft]…this requires some resolution; but I can see no other way to make all the corrections and keep the lilt and join up and expand and do all the other processes. It is like sweeping over an entire canvas with a wet brush.
While Virginia’s quantity of output varied, she mentions at one point that she could produce two pages per day when writing and six per day when revising. Here, when typing (and therefore revising) The Waves, she is slightly more productive in part because she felt that working quickly was necessary because it allowed her to see the shape of the project as a whole.
When is it helpful and when is it unhelpful to compare ourselves to others in terms of a specific, quantified output? Sometimes it can be comforting, because two pages per day or a morning’s worth of work might feel like an achievable goal.
But sometimes it can be stifling, because we compare ourselves to someone whose circumstances or whose creative approach is very different from our own. It can be easy to fall into a habit of measuring ourselves only by the quantity of work we produce. I think that is a trap and it seems like Virginia may have thought so too.
October 1934 – I am so sleepy. Is this age? I can’t shake it off. And so gloomy. That’s the end of the book. I looked up past diaries – a reason for keeping them – and found the same miseries after Waves. After Lighthouse I was, I remember, nearer suicide, seriously, than since 1913. It is after all natural. I’ve been galloping now for three months – so excited I made a plunge at my paper – well, cut that all off – after the first divine relief, of course some terrible blankness must spread. There’s nothing left of the people, of the ideas, of the strain, of the whole life in short that has been racing round my brain: not only the brain; it has seized hold of my leisure: think how I used to sit still on the same railway lines: running on my book. Well, so there’s nothing to be done the next two or three or even four weeks but dandle oneself; refuse to face it; refuse to think about it.
You reach that exciting, singular, exhausting moment of finishing a project. You’re relieved, but you also feel that something has been lost. Hopefully, this doesn’t push you towards suicidal feelings. If it does, please seek help! But some amount of sadness is natural. This isn’t even self-doubt about the quality of a work, which Virginia also felt, but a sense of loss because you can no longer turn over in your mind ideas that you’ve been thinking about for months or even years.
Personally, I’m drawn to the practical advice at the end of the quote. Put the work aside for several weeks (or, of course, for a different amount of time that makes sense for you). Don’t think about it. Recognize the feelings of loss as unavoidable but transitory.
ON HOW TO WRITE
May 1920 – 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. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything. I’m a little anxious. How am I to bring off this conception? Directly one gets to work one is like a person walking, who has seen the country stretching out before. I want to write nothing in this book that I don’t enjoy writing. Yet writing is always difficult.
First, let’s address the idea that working on art is like walking along a path you’ve seen before. This suggests you might know the general contours of the landscape, but perhaps not every nook and cranny. You know that your destination exists, because you’ve been there before, but you start to worry because you’re not seeing a landmark that you’re sure you remember from last time.
You might prefer a slightly different metaphor: you’re walking down a new path with a map you’ve used before. You know the map is reliable, if you’re reading it correctly, so it will get you where you need to go. But the scenery is not familiar – so you start to wonder if your map might be wrong. You wonder if you should have chosen a different map, or an easier route.
Both framings suggest that creation brings with it some fear and uncertainty. But they suggest that the walk itself, the act of putting pencil to paper, can be a comfort if you let yourself forget for a few moments about the destination and just enjoy your surroundings – if you’re the sort of person who likes to go on walks.
There is also obvious comfort here in seeing Virginia struggle through the challenges and even the boredom of creating work that we now see as successful. But let’s focus on one line that is more subtly interesting: “The sense of an impending shape keeps one at it more than anything.” This suggests that a vague idea of a book’s goals can be a motivator and a guiding light. Note that Virginia doesn’t say “a specific plot” or “an exact knowledge of what the book means.” But there’s a clarity, even an excitement, of feeling your work congeal into some form, even if that form is uncertain. So while deciding exactly what you want a book to convey before you begin it is probably unwise, complete ignorance of what you are working towards is also unhelpful.
September 1920 – 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.
Like all of us, Virginia could be fickle and self-critical when talking about her own approach. Just a few months after “the sense of an impending shape” was enough to keep her going, she longs for a clearer plan of action. So it’s a difficult balance: thinking through the goals of a work, but not thinking through them too much.
September 1925 – How my handwriting goes down hill! Another sacrifice to the Hogarth Press. Yet what I owe the Hogarth Press is barely paid by the whole of my handwriting. Haven’t I just written to Herbert Fisher refusing to do a book for the Home University Series on Post Victorian? – knowing that I can write a book, a better book, a book off my own bat, a book for the Press if I wish! … I’m the only woman in England free to write what I like.
The immediate lesson here is familiar to anyone who has self-published – the creative freedom inherent in printing your own work. Although few are lucky enough to assume their self-published efforts could support them financially, as Virginia’s could in her later years. Are there ways to synthesize that feeling of creative freedom, irrespective of your circumstances or your publishing plans? To what extent did Virginia’s creative freedom depend on her financial freedom? They’re certainly not unrelated.
May 1927 [in a letter to Roger Fry] – I meant nothing by the lighthouse [in To The Lighthouse]. One has to have a central line down the middle of the book to hold the design together. I saw that all sorts of feelings would accrue to this, but I refused to think them out, and trusted that people would make it the deposit for their own emotions – which they have done, one thinking it means one thing another another. I can’t manage Symbolism except in this vague, generalized way. Whether it’s right or wrong I don’t know; but directly I’m told what a thing means, it becomes hateful to me.
October 1929 – One thinks one has learnt to write quickly; and one hasn’t. And what is odd, I’m not writing with gusto or pleasure: because of the concentration. I am not reeling it off; but sticking it down. Also, never, in my life, did I attack such a vague yet elaborate design; whenever I make a mark I have to think of its relation to a dozen others. And though I could go on ahead easily enough, I am always stopping to consider the whole effect. In particular is there some radical fault in my scheme?
December 1929 – I write two pages of arrant nonsense [for The Waves], after straining; I write variations of every sentence; compromises; bad shots; possibilities; til my writing book is like a lunatic’s dream. Then I trust to some inspiration on rereading; and pencil them into some sense. Still I am not satisfied. I think there is something lacking. I sacrifice nothing to seemliness. I press to my centre. I don’t care if it all is scratched out. And there is something there.
February 1931 – What interests me in the last stage was the freedom and boldness with which my imagination picked up used and tossed aside all the images, symbols which I had prepared. I am sure that this is the right way of using them – not in set pieces, as I had tried at first, coherently, but simply as images; never making them work out; only suggest. Thus I hope to have kept the sound of the sea and the birds, dawn and garden subconsciously present, doing their work under ground.
The four quotes above are useful to read as a whole, because together they give a good sense of Virginia’s approach to constructing her work. She knew where she was going, and considered her words carefully, but that doesn’t mean that she was considering the deeper, symbolic meaning of each word or each image. Even when she planned to deploy symbols consciously, she sometimes found herself going down a different path. You could argue that this was in part enabled by her careful focus on her craft – the writing and rewriting of an important sentence, until it felt just right, being more important than what that sentence might mean. Meaning, indeed, is never explicit but “only suggest[ed].”
This should not be mistaken for laziness or sloppiness, not when she is thinking of each mark in “relation to a dozen others” or writing “variations of every sentence.” It is, however, an emphasis on intuition over an explicit analysis of which variation might be exactly right.
Did Virginia always have this intuition? To what extent was it developed as she wrote more and more? How did she balance her desire to find the right variation with the necessity of moving forward?
The reference to marks relating to a dozen others is interesting because of how it might be applied to drawing. Should we view each line on a page, in a panel, as related to every other line, compositionally or metaphorically? What insights might be offered by that approach? When might it be constricting and when enabling?
May 1934 – The last chapters [of The Years] must be so rich, so resuming, so weaving everything together that I can only go on by letting my mind brood every morning on the whole book. There’s no longer any need to forge ahead, as the narrative part is over. What I want is to enrich and stabilize…I shan’t, I think, re-read; I shall summon it back…from my memory.
June 1935 – In some ways, it’s rather like writing The Waves – these last scenes [of The Years]. I bring my brain to a state of congestion, have to stop: go upstairs, run into towsled Mrs. Brewster; come back; find a little flow of words. It’s the extreme condensation; the contrasts; the keeping it all together. Does this mean that it’s good?
Have you ever felt this way? I think I have. It’s a frenetic energy as you finish a long project, a combination of excitement at finishing, doubt at whether you can stick the landing, fear of what you might do next. You think about how the ending relates to the rest of the work but then you remind yourself not to think of meaning and symbols too explicitly. You strive forward. You get overwhelmed and take a break. You work consistently. Pages accumulate.
October 1935 – No, I will not hurry this book [The Years]. I’m going to let every scene shape fully and easily in my hands, before sending it to be typed, even if it has to wait another year. I wonder why time is always allowed to harry one.
ON WHAT TO WRITE
July or August 1926 (undated?) – I shall here write the first pages of the greatest book in the world. This is what the book would be that was made entirely solely and with integrity of one’s thoughts. Suppose one could catch them before they became ”works of art”? Catch them hot and sudden as they rise in the mind – walking up Asheham hill for instance. Of course one cannot; for the process of language is slow and deluding. One must stop to find a word; then, there is the form of the sentence, soliciting one to fill it.
How can we this apply this idea to our own work? What might we change if we viewed our practice as an act of capturing “hot and sudden” thoughts instead of “works of art”? Do we view our practice as making works of art now? What is the most immediate method for capturing our thoughts, and how might we convey those thoughts in a manner reflective of how they first occurred to use?
Here are some possible answers, though I encourage you to think of your own:
- As Virginia implies here, this goal is impossible but it can be a north star that we constantly pursue.
- This goal is impossible, so it is instead best to have your work resemble but not actually be made of hot and sudden thoughts, in the same way that written dialogue often imitates but does not replicate actual conversations.
- This line of thinking is best interpreted literally, meaning that you should draw or write as quickly as possible and without a filter.
- This line of thinking is best interpreted literally, meaning that you should draw or write in a way that most closely reflects the way you think, even if this makes your work less immediately coherent or polished.
March 1927 – For the truth is I feel the need of an escapade after these serious poetic experimental books whose form is always so closely considered. I want to kick up my heels and be off. I want to embody all those innumerable little ideas and tiny stories which flash into my mind at all seasons. I think this [Orlando: A Biography] will be great fun to write; and it will rest my head before starting the very serious, mystical poetic work which I want to come next.
For a period in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Virginia produced a series of books that alternated between serious and poetic versus light and casual: To The Lighthouse (1927); Orlando: A Biography (1928); The Waves (1931); and Flush: A Biography (1933). That timeline is also notable because it shows that the light works took less time to write – Virginia did not force a difficult book to be finished quickly or require a lighter work to drag out over many years.
In addition to the creative benefits that she highlights here, that scheme was also financially useful: Orlando and Flush were two of Virginia’s most commercially successful works. She recognized that fact, although she resisted the temptation to put aside her more challenging work.
November 1928 – I shape a page or two; and make myself stop. Indeed I am up against some difficulties. Fame to begin with. Orlando has done very well. Now I could go on writing like that – the tug and suck are at me to do it. People say this was so spontaneous, so natural. And I would like to keep those qualities if I could without losing the others. But those qualities were largely the result of ignoring the others. They came of writing exteriorly; and if I dig, must I not lose them? And what is my own position towards the inner and the outer? I think a kind of ease and dash are good; – yes: I think even externality is good; some combination of them ought to be possible.
The idea has come to me that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment whole; whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a combination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste, deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don’t belong to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist: getting on from lunch to dinner: it is false, unreal, merely conventional.
So at least sometimes, the relationship between, say, Orlando and The Waves was not two separate streams of creative work but two parts of Virginia’s ongoing attempt to bring her way of writing closer to her way of thinking.
It’s also interesting that, here as in a few other moments, Virginia was able to identify and articulate what she wanted to do with her writing – and then she arguably did exactly that. Perhaps this is part of what made her special, but there is a general lesson in the fact that she took time to consider where she wanted her work to go, and where it might go, rather than just mindlessly pushing ahead.
March 1930 – The test of a book (to a writer) is if it makes a space in which, quite naturally, you can say what you want to say.
April 1939 – In future, I’m to write quick, intense, short books, and never be tied down. This is the way to keep off the settling down and refrigeration of old age.
I like this last quote because it is closer to my own preferences, at least right now. I prefer to make shorter books, say no more than 100 pages, rather than works that string together a vast web of ideas over several hundred pages. Maybe this reflects a lack of work ethic or endurance on my part, but I like the idea that a reader can hold all the ideas of a shorter work in their head at once, and ruminate on them. How well can you recall the first few pages of a long magnum opus as you reach page 400?
ON PLANNING AND SCHEDULING
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 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 would take, when she would complete a draft, when she might publish a book or essay – and she almost always underestimated how long her work would take!
There are multiple lessons to be drawn from this. 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 (see ON HOW TO WRITE). 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.
January 1930 – I am stuck fast in that book [The Waves] – I mean, glued to it, like a fly on gummed paper. Sometimes I am out of touch; but go on; then again feel that I have at last, by violent measures – like breaking through gorse – set my hands on something central.
September 1930 – I shall attack The Waves on Thursday. So this illness has meant two weeks break – but as I often think, season of silence, and brooding, and making up much more than one can use, are fertilising. I was raking my brain too hard.
This again relates to ON HOW TO WRITE, but it also touches on scheduling: Virginia sometimes fell into periods of excess in terms of her writing, working furiously and for longer each day than was typical. Sometimes she felt this was necessary – for instance towards the end of a novel, as she worked to bring together its complex strands – but other times she seems to have recognized this as a misstep: “I was raking my brain too hard.” This sometimes led, as in the quotes above, to periods when she was confined to her bed.
So as much as we might imagine Virginia as someone who diligently made time for hobbies and friends, who worked on her writing for only a few hours each day, she did stumble. As we all do.
May 1934 – What is important now is to go very slowly; to stop in the middle of the flood; never to press on; to lie back and let the soft subconscious world become populous; not to be urging foam from my lips. There’s no hurry. I’ve enough money to last a year.
Sometimes Virginia had to “attack” a project, but other times she had to “stop in the middle of a flood.” When did she decide which of these approaches was required? Was her decision always right? How much of this ease would she be able to feel if she didn’t have enough money to last a year?
September 1938 – Yet I was just getting into the old, very old, rhythm of regular reading, first this book then that: Roger all the morning [Roger Fry: A Biography, Virginia’s one book-length non-fiction work]; walk from 2 to 4; bowls 5 to 6:30; the Madame de Sévigné; get dinner 7:30; read Roger; listen to music; bind Eddie’s Candide; read Siegfred Sassoon; and so bed at 11:30 or so. A very good rhythm; but I can only manage it for a few days it seems. Next week all broken.
If I’d cut off this entry two sentences earlier, it would fit nicely into a neat, clean compilation of quotes about writers and their schedules. (Which can be a helpful thing! I’ve read books like that and sometimes found them useful!) But of course the reality is more complicated because Virginia was fallible. She’d set a deadline and then miss it. She’d establish a routine and then break it. So we should be kind to ourselves when we do the same thing.
ON TIME AND GETTING OLDER
January 1920 – The day after my birthday in fact I’m 38, well, I’ve no doubt I’m a great deal happier than I was at 28; and happier today than I was yesterday.
Virginia’s first novel, The Voyage Out, was published when she was 33. Mrs. Dalloway, arguably her first real masterpiece, was published when she was 43, and she produced most of her best work in her forties. In a time when we’re expected to find creative success quickly, and when it’s easy to compare ourselves with those who have been successful at a young age, I find Virginia’s path incredibly comforting. As she indicates here, she was not only more creatively successful but happier in her thirties and beyond.
However, discussions of publishing history ignore the meditation of that final clause: “I’m happier today than I was yesterday.” This is not because Virginia’s happiness was a constant, upwards trajectory – certainly not, as it isn’t for any of us – but because she woke up on that particular day, and felt happy, and in the moment that was enough.
November 1921 – Death, at least must seem to be there, visible, expectant. One ought to work – never to take one’s eyes from one’s work; and then if death should interrupt, well, it is merely that one must get up and leave one’s stitching – one won’t have wasted a thought on death.
Like most of us, Virginia’s thoughts about mortality fluctuated significantly depending on her mood, her mental state, and her circumstances. One continued thread, however, is that she felt most content when she was able to focus on her work, to live in the present, and to revel in the simple pleasures of her daily routine.
August 1922 – There’s no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice; and that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.
October 1922 – At forty I am beginning to learn the mechanism of my own brain – how to get the greatest amount of pleasure and work out of it. The secret is I think always so to contrive that work is pleasant.
Virginia’s creative success in her forties and beyond was in no small part, she seems to tell us, because she had spent more time inside her own head. She understood how to convert her thoughts into words. She understood what made her writing strong and how she could make it stronger. She understood how to make her work pleasurable.
It seems to me that there are no shortcuts to reaching this stage – there weren’t any for Virginia. In other words, her route to creative success was both as simple and as complex as it could possibly be: she just let the work, and time, accumulate.
July 1925 – But I don’t think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret to happiness, but only reached now in middle age.
ON MONEY
June 1929 – This last half year I made over 1800 GBP [$145,000]; almost at the rate of 4000 GBP a year [$320,000 USD]; the salary almost of a Cabinet minister; and time was, two years ago, when I toiled to make 200 GBP [$16,200]. Now I am overpaid I think for my little articles – and I still think that the great pleasure of prosperity is to be able to go into a shop and buy a pocket knife. Well, after tomorrow I shall close down article writing, and give way to fiction for six or seven months – til next March perhaps.
It’s important to place Virginia’s creative life in the context of her financial situation. Luckily, she and Leonard left a number of detailed financial figures at various points in their lives. In the quote above and in the few paragraphs that follow, I’ve roughly converted these amounts to 2019 US dollars, because I’m trying to think carefully about how the Woolfs’ financial situation does or does not offer any lessons on how to live a sustainable creative life today.
Virginia and Leonard were never in a truly dire financial situation, but they also did not have excess funds to spend on most personal luxuries or on a vanity publishing project in their early years. Leonard’s careful accounting of their income in this period is a useful resource.:
| Journalism | Books | Total | |
| 1919 | $7,834 | $0 | $7,834 |
| 1920 | $10,372 | $5,782 | $16,154 |
| 1921 | $2,808 | $597 | $3,405 |
| 1922 | $4,785 | $2288 | $7,073 |
| 1923 | $11,660 | $2,951 | $14,611 |
| 1924 | $9,497 | $2,744 | $12,241 |
Leonard provided these details, which he describes as “miserable figures” but not “particularly unusual [for writers],” to give a clearer picture of the life that he and Virginia led in these early years. So we must ask questions like: Where could you live off $7,000 or even $14,000 in 2019? In many large cities, this would be quite difficult. What circumstances might lead you to feel comfortable launching a publishing house on this income? What does it say that Leonard neglects to discuss or even mention the couple’s (small, but not zero) inherited wealth in his tabulation?
On this last question, Quentin Bell’s biography of Virginia offers some details: “Virginia, who had inherited some money from [her late brother] Thoby and some from her aunt Caroline Emelia Stephen, had – “theoretically” as Leonard puts it – an invested capital of some 9000 GBP [$500,000]; and this yielded less than 400 GBP [$32,000] a year.” So the Woolfs were living on $39,000 a year in 1919; still a challenge, perhaps, but far less dire than Leonard’s figures make it seem. It’s easier to take creative risks when you’re guaranteed $32,000 each year!
Another figure that must be mentioned in discussions of Virginia’s finances is 500 GBP, or about $40,000 today. She argues, in A Room of One’s Own, that a writer must receive this amount each year in order to produce creative work. Some essays on Room argue that Virginia chose this figure because it was her own yearly income from her inheritance at the time. I haven’t come across a primary source citing this amount, but maybe I didn’t do enough research, and it’s close enough to Quentin Bell’s 400 GBP mentioned above.
On the one hand, Virginia was careful financially, especially in her leaner early years. She did not indulge in simple pleasures like going into a shop and buying a pocket knife until she’d become quite financially comfortable and even then her pleasure were simple. She also funded herself with journalism work and other side projects for the many years that her creative work could not support her.
On the other hand, she never really grapples, not even in A Room of One’s Own, with the advantages conferred on her by that 400 or 500 GBP of guaranteed income. We don’t know, though we can certainly guess, to what extent this financial cushion helped her to retain a well of creative energy.
What does all this mean about how we should understand the relationship between money and creativity in Virginia’s life? I’m not sure. At the very least, it’s a reminder that we should not always compare our own choices to those of someone in a very different set of circumstances. Even Virginia’s most cogent and direct advice is only a suggestion. Maybe it will be helpful, but maybe it won’t. Maybe it simply doesn’t apply to our own situation.
ON CRITICS, CRITICISM, AND FAME
June 1925 – It’s odd that when Clive and others (several of them) say it [Mrs Dalloway] is a masterpiece, I am not much exalted; when Lytton picks holes, I get back into my working fighting mood, which is natural to me. I don’t see myself a success. I like the sense of effort better.
After each of her books was published, Virginia devoted a significant portion of her diary to fretting over first imagined and then actual reactions to the book. Comments from her close friends and from unknown reviewers were given equal attention, and as she indicates here she obsessed over certain criticisms of her work. This is comforting, since many of us do the same thing, but I don’t excerpt her lengthy recitations of who reviewed each book and when, because they’re not particularly interesting. She probably should have spent less time worrying about reviews and we probably should too.
In her best moods, however, Virginia could use a critique as fuel to push forward. This was especially true for criticism that she felt was accurate.
October 1933 – I will not be ‘famous,’ ‘great.’ I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.
November 1938 – I’m fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It’s an odd feeling though, writing against the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall.
Virginia felt this way less often, if measured by how frequently it came up relative to the anxious recitations of how her books had been received. So perhaps this is a feeling that we too should not expect to encounter often, even if we do our best to pursue it. We should try not to feel impeded. We should try not to read reviews.
ON KEEPING A DIARY
January 1919 – I have just reread my year’s diary and am much struck by the rapid haphazard gallop at which it swings along, sometimes indeed jerking almost intolerably over the cobbles. Still if it were not written rather faster than the fastest typewriting, if I stopped and took thought, it would never be written at all; and the advantage of the method is that it sweeps up accidentally several stray matters which I should exclude if I hesitated, but which are the diamonds of the dustheap.
Virginia used her diary to record events that she wanted to remember or that she might use in her work; to think through specific challenges in her writing; and for experimental writing exercises that, she later said, helped her develop the style she used in her best work. Her diary practice might best be described as regularly irregular; she sometimes did not write in her diary for weeks or even months, but she always returned to it.
Not all of her entries are long. Not all of her entries are thoughtful. But some of them are, and that seems to have been the important point. In comics, some people say that a daily strip is a useful way to make yourself work consistently and to stumble upon new approaches. But Virginia’s experience shows that any kind of regular creative experimentation, even if it might be far less than daily, can be helpful in this way.
Notably, Virginia appears to have never shared her diary with anyone. She entertains no fantasies, at least in writing, about the diary being published. So this loose writing and experimentation was only for her – because she did reread her earlier entries, and at a few times even imagined how an older Virginia might react to a certain entry. The diary was a dialogue with herself.
April 1919 – …the habit of writing thus for my eye only is good practise. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do must make the most direct and instant shots at my object, and thus have to lay hands on words, choose them, and shoot them with no more pause than is needed to put my pen in ink.
How could we apply the practice of quick, unfiltered diary writing to comics or other visual mediums? One challenge the simple fact that drawing takes more time than writing. Is it possible to draw as quickly as we think? Attempting to do so might be a useful exercise. Or maybe a better approach is to draw automatically, without thinking, even if this means your drawings take more time.
QUOTES THAT NEED NO COMMENTARY, BECAUSE THEY ARE SO SELF-EVIDENTLY RELEVANT TO COMICS
May 1929 – This is written, as many pages in the past used to be written, to try a new pen; for I am vacillating – can’t be sure to stick to the old pen any more. And then every gold pen has some fateful drawback. Never have I met one without. And then one can’t be sure til one’s written a long screed. And then one’s ashamed to go back – and then one does – and then it all begins again.
September 1924 – Suppose one can keep the quality of a sketch in a finished and composed work? That is my endeavor.