How we work: Virginia Woolf, author

Here's Woolf, who apparently wrote standing at her desk* (as does Philip Roth, and as did Lewis Carroll and Ernest Hemingway), on madness as catalyst...:

"As an experience, madness is terrific... and not to be sniffed at, and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets as sanity does."

... and on time: "What I write today I should not write in a year's time." (Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind, London, The Hogarth Press, 1985, 12).

And she foreshadows the cut-up: "Arrange whatever pieces come your way", and so bitter-sweetly suggests: "I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."

* and would write "Knowledge? Matter for further speculation? I can think sitting still as well as standing up." in 'The Mark on the Wall', in Monday or Tuesday, 1912.

More how we work.

Comments

[Dan]

on madness and catalyst: there's a wonderful book called 'Touched with Fire', which is an examination (by a respected psychiatrist) of the links between creativity and manic depression. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/068483183X/

[Achgar Mohammed]

real i need help because i didn not understand what is about the mark on the wall

[Achgar Mohammed]

also i need a summary if you can send it to my email as far as possible because i will have an exame tomorow thans very much.