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.
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/
Posted by: Dan | December 20, 2004 at 01:43 AM
real i need help because i didn not understand what is about the mark on the wall
Posted by: Achgar Mohammed | April 29, 2009 at 05:27 PM
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.
Posted by: Achgar Mohammed | April 29, 2009 at 05:29 PM