New Writing

The art of composition, its processes, techniques and inspirations, is something that preoccupies the thoughts of the majority of modern-day writers. Academics, novelists, journalist, critics, reviewers, essayists, bloggers et al agonise over what they want to say and how they want to say it. And who in the writing world has ever felt completely happy with what they’ve produced? Not only are we concerned with getting words onto the page, but with how they get there. This is nothing new. So to whom do we look, as writers, when the muse has fled and inspiration fails us: when the grammar is stilted, the punctuation inhibiting and the prose failing to flow? Surely it is reassuring to think that these are age-old problems that plagued our literary predecessors? Throughout history writers have continually demonstrated a preoccupation with the mechanics and origins of compositional style, none more so than my own literary heroine Virginia Woolf: a writer whose style, innovation and authorial voice is still influencing writers today. Both Michael Cunningham and Robin Lippincott capitalised on Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway to create The Hours and Mr Dalloway respectively, whilst Susan Sellers most recent addition to the Two Ravens stable,Vanessa and Virginia, continues to embrace Woolf’s lyrical intensity in order to fictionalise the author’s turbulent relationship with her sister; the artist Vanessa bell. Woolf’s used her artistic anxiety as a resource to produce great literature, whichfor modern-day writers cannot fail to both reassure and inspire.

Born into a household dominated by the literary presence of her father, the Victorian biographer Leslie Stephen, it seems to us now, with the benefit of hindsight, that Woolf was born to write; born to create, to craft and to mould the written word. Few of us who know and love her work would dispute that, for Virginia Woolf, writing was as essential to her existence as breathing. However the process was far from innate or natural; like many of us she was a writer consumed by anxiety over her work and as such became concerned as much with the processes of writing as with the product itself. Writing, in its many forms played an important part in Woolf’s life, beginning in early childhood: she herself observed in her diary that writing had absorbed her ‘ever since I was a little creature, scribbling a story in the manner of Hawthorne on the green plush sofa in the drawing room at St. Ives while the grown ups dined.’ (Diary 5, 19th December 1938) For many generations Woolf’s writing has been somewhat eclipsed by the scandalous notoriety of the Bloomsbury group; her relationship with Vita Sackville-West; her madness; and her suicide, all of which have taken up prominent space in published works on her life, often pushing the writing to one side. When the late Julia Briggs conceived her biography of Woolf it was ‘inspired by Woolf’s own interest in the process of writing, as well as by a corresponding unease with accounts that (like Orlando’s biographer) concentrated too narrowly on her social life, and so underestimated the centrality of her art’ (Briggs, An Inner Life. (2005) p.x). In truth the only way to get to understand Woolf’s life and self is through her work: as she writes in Orlando: ‘every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works’ (p.145)

Woolf spent most of her life writing. When she wasn’t writing, she was thinking about writing or reading in order to write. Every moment was absorbed with writing: whether it was novels, essays, theories, political manifestos, or private diaries and letters, much of Woolf’s day was taken up with the written word in one form or another. Few writers have left behind such a full history of their own creative processes. Woolf’s diaries and letters bulge with references to her writing, alongside novels, which often contain meta-narratives about writing or creativity. Inevitably, when Virginia Woolf put pen to paper, the subject would turn to composition. As an author Woolf was self-conscious, self-reflexive and self-intertextual, weaving webs of meaning into and between all aspects of her writing. Characters like Rachel Vinrace in The Voyage Out; Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse; Bernard in The Waves; and Orlando in Orlando: A Biography are all concerned with the art of composition in one form or another, be it music, art or writing. Besides her novels Woolf composed numerous essays specifically about the art of composition. ‘Modern Fiction’ attempts to encapsulate the spirit of modernist aesthetics, whilst ‘Mrs Brown and Mr Bennett’ compares the different methods used by realists and modernists in the art of creating a novel’s characters. Rainbow and Granite contains several essays composed upon her ideas about writing and reading, not least of all ‘Women and Fiction’ which she later developed into A Room of One’s Own: a feminist manifesto which attempts to trace the unrecorded literary lineage of modern women writers and the problems they face. The Woolf scholar Sue Roe has described Woolf as someone who ‘used the process of writing as a way of shaping meaning: language did not immediately express but rather gave her access to the insights her work reflects’(Roe: Writing and Gender (1990) p.130).

Memories were a fundamental source of creative inspiration for Woolf, reverberating through her writing like the repetitive motion of the Cornish waves. In ‘A Sketch of the Past’ Woolf observed that ‘[i]f life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills - then my bowl, without a doubt stands upon [the first] memory’ (Roe: Writing and Gender(1990) p.130).Many of her novels resulted from, or take up the refrain of, her short stories, essays or memoirs, and often ideas were generated and germinated whilst she was in the process of writing about something unrelated. In her diary, as she was finishing To the Lighthouse, she records herself becoming aware of ‘a fin passing far out […] I hazard the guess that it may be the impulse behind another book’ (Diary 3 (1983) entry dated Thursday 30th September 1926, p.113). This sensation is juxtaposed against a memory of being unable to ‘step across a puddle’ and both later re-emerge within the context of The Waves. In many ways Woolf’s novels are like the echo chambers of her compositional process. The methodologies she employed are explored through many of her central characters as they grapple with the problems associated with their respective art. Orlando, like Woolf, agonises over the ‘paradoxes inherent in the writing process, wringing metaphorical hands over the difficulties of narrating a writer’s life when its central activity - sitting still and thinking - is no activity at all’ (Briggs, Inner Life (2005) p.197). Bernard in The Waves embodies the spirit of a modernistic writer when in the final chapter he claims:How tired I am of stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground! Also how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half-sheets of notepaper. I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement. I begin to seek some design more in accordance with those moments of humiliation and triumph that come now and then undeniably (p.183). This echoes the sentiments Woolf expressed earlier in her essay ‘Modern Fiction’ where, feeling embattled by the ‘materialists’ – H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy – she seeks to eschew the ‘phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground’ in favour of recording the ‘atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall’ so as to ‘trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness’ (p.150). Bernard expresses this poetically by saying: ‘What delights me is the confusion, the height the indifference and the fury. Great clouds always changing and movement; something sulphurous and sinister, bowled up, helter-skelter; towering, trailing off, broken off, lost and I forgotten, minute, in a ditch. Of story of design, I do not see a trace then’. (p. 184) Woolf used her novels to transpose real-life people and events onto the page in a fictitious fusion of fact and fantasy: ‘exorcising past [and present] relationships’ (Briggs, Inner Life (2005) p.193) by negotiating the slippage that occurred between the ‘granite’ and the ‘rainbow’. They also provided her with a platform from which to subtly proselytise the modernist aesthetic and a space in which to analyse the complexities of the compositional process.

Whilst most of her novels explore the creative processes in one way or another, both Orlando and The Waves prove particularly fertile ground for excavating the author’s own ideas about writing. Orlando, ostensibly a biography about Vita Sackville-West – ‘begun as a joke’ – is also the biography of a writer: a poet (Vita was both). But Orlando has as much in common with Woolf herself as he/she does with Vita. Orlando’s creative energy, like that of Woolf, was inspired by reading: as Brenda Silver words it ‘[s]he read for pleasure, and she read for work. She read to ease her mind, and to fertilize it’ (The Notebooks,1983, p.3). During the opening pages of the novel, its eponymous hero is witnessed pouring over his workbook which ‘soon he had covered ten pages and more of poetry’ (p.13). From the outset the novel traces the fortunes of a young poet as he, then she, struggles with what eventually becomes her magnum opus, a poem entitled ‘The Oak Tree’. This poem takes 300 years to complete and undergoes extensive modification, which not only provides a satirical critique on Vita’s epic ‘The Land’ (which took 10 years to complete), but also reflects Woolf’s own painstaking revisionary approach to her work. Orlando (literally) keeps the manuscript close to his/her chest, rewriting it periodically, a practice rigorously followed by Woolf. On completion of Orlando, she notes in her diary: ‘Orlando was finished yesterday as the clock struck one. Anyhow the canvas is covered. There will be three months of close work needed, imperatively, before it can be printed; for I have scrambled & splashed, & the canvas shows through in a thousand places’. (Diaries 3 p.176) In a refrain similar to that of Bernard, Orlando, as a writer is disillusioned by Sir Nicholas Greene’s account of literature: ‘She had thought literature all these years (her seclusion her rank her sex must be her excuse) as something wild as the wind, hot as fire, swift as lightening; something errant, incalculable, abrupt, and behold literature was an elderly gentleman in a grey suit talking about duchesses’(p.194-5) Despite being written ‘quicker than any: & it is all joke; & yet gay & quick reading I think; a writers holiday’ (Diaries3, p.177) Orlando was far from perfected, according to Woolf’s own exacting standards.

Orlando’s position as ‘writer’ is one that clearly mimics that of the author. In chapter II the narrator informs us that Orlando: ‘[…]soon perceived, however, that the battles which Sir Miles and the rest had waged against armed knights to win a kingdom, were not half so arduous as this which he now undertook to win immortality against the English language. Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore it up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted his people’s parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world’. (p.55-6) This passage appears to condense into two (admittedly long and eloquent) sentences the rigour and turbulence of Woolf’s own life-long relationship with the written word. Similarly the figure of Sir Nicholas represents the implacable face of the literary establishment casting a pall over Orlando’s creative endeavour, allegorizing Woolf’s own antipathy to the established literary order. Both Orlando and Woolf share similar, and paradoxical, desires to create work that both satisfy and radically challenge the literary status quo. Orlando’s development as a writer spans five centuries and the language of his poem can be seen to take on the style and flavour of the literary modes du jour. Briggs called Orlando ‘an occasional history of English prose’ (p.207), identifying that the Woolf’s own style for each chapter (like ‘The Oak Tree’) echoed the fashion of the age.In the final chapter – where the aesthetics of Modernism dominates – the novel undergoes a notable shift from biography to autobiography. The figure of Orlando, at this juncture, is more representative of the author than of her professed subject (Vita) who in no way exhibited the Modernist bent in her work. Orlando’s creative vision, like Woolf, becomes fragmentary and myriad as the impact of modernity becomes realised.

In The Waves, it is Bernard who occupies the position of composer, largely of ‘perfect phrases’ and who, like Orlando, experiments, reflects and develops his notions of compositional style throughout the course of the novel and his life time. In the section with the opening line ‘[t]he sun had sunk lower in the sky’, Woolf, through Bernard, puts the writing process under close scrutiny. In a process similar to that of Orlando, Bernard largely reflects back the author’s own writing ethos. Identifying how ‘it is curious how, at every crisis, some phrase which does not fit insists on coming to the rescue – the penalty of living in an old civilisation with a notebook’ (p.141) Bernard finds himself unable to ‘finish my sentences’ and buys himself a ticket to Rome. Reduced to ‘a very simple man who knows only words of one syllable’, Bernard represents the author when the muse has gone continuing: ‘I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have not yet found that story. And I begin to ask, Are there Stories?’ (p.141) Woolf struggled with how to begin what she called her ‘very serious, mystical, poetical work’ (Diary 3, entry dated 14th March 1927, p.131) – not having ‘any notion of what it [was] to be like’. Her diary entries, which chart the conception and execution of The Waves, are often reworked into Bernard’s character, who voices many of Woolf’s own anxieties, not least of which is the distinct possibility ‘that the idea will evaporate’ (Diary 3, entry dated 14th March 1927, p.131): a sentiment expressed in Bernard’s unfinished sentences. Bernard’s statement: ‘Here am I shedding one of my life-skins, and all they say is, “Bernard is spending ten days in Rome”. Here am I marching up and down this terrace alone, unoriented. But observe how the dots and dashes are beginning, as I walk, to run themselves into continuous lines, how things are losing the bald, the separate identity that they had as I walked up those steps’. (p.144) expresses the precarious and intangible way in which Woolf’s ideas for her work were formulated; as if with a life of their own. The Waves is one of Woolf’s most self-reflexive novels, which commentates on its own conception and germination: ‘So Bernard […] let us begin this new chapter, and observe the formation of this new, this unknown, strange, altogether unidentified and terrifying experience – the new drop – which is about to shape itself.’ (p.145) Even the book's experimental narrative structure mirrors Woolf’s own method of writing and composing different pieces simultaneously. In Bernard she imagined ‘a novelist or biographer who would be her true spokesman’ (Gordon: A Writer’s Life, 1984. p.283). Just as the conversations of the characters in The Waves are interspersed and cut across by each other, so too is Woolf’s writing and thinking. Orlando was conceived and executed whilst the ‘fin’ of The Waves circled around her consciousness. During this time she also wrote ‘The New Biography’ and ‘The Narrow Bridge of Art’, both theoretical works that would influence Orlando and The Waves respectively. In her notebook, started out the outset of The Waves, Woolf noted a possible title of ‘The Moths? Or the life of anybody’, indicating that the story would begin with an ‘enormous moth’ which ‘made a mysterious hieroglyph, always dissolving’ (Briggs: 2005, p.242), a significant metaphor for the elusively nascent ideas that would later achieve cogency in the novel.

As a writer Woolf left an enormous archive concerning her own compositional process. Numerous manuscripts and drafts, annotated with marginalia, commentary and supported by cross-referencing letters and diary entries, exist for much of her work. As an acolyte of Woolf’s work it is possible to trace the compositional process of any given piece of Woolf’s writing, from the time of its conception to its completion, and the myriad changes that took place in between. This is so much the case that recent editors for new editions of Woolf’s work are faced with making incalculable decisions in order to try and arrive at what can be called a definitive version (if in fact such a version can ever exist). Her own assiduous approach to revising her work, her perfectionism and fluctuating confidence in her ability as a writer is well documented and catalogued making Woolf one of the most fascinating and accessible writers to analyse in terms of her compositional method. But what is most significant about Woolf is how her method seeped through into her fiction and how elements of her fiction bled out into her theoretical essays. Whilst it would be reductive in the extreme to view the novels solely through an autobiographical lens it is fair to argue that the tropes of the writer or artist recur in nearly all of Woolf’s work; whether it be as the playwright, Miss La Trobe in Between the Acts; the failed biographer, Mrs Hillbury in Night and Day; or the would-be novelist, Terence Hewet, in The Voyage Out. Through these figures Woolf’s own compositional process and progress can be tangibly traced alongside her ideas about Modernist aestheticism. Woolf’s novels not only capture the soul of their subject but of the writer as well. For Woolf it was clear than when she penned ‘every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works’ she meant every word. Woolf is not only a literary legend, but also a contemporary source of inspiration for writers everywhere.

Cited Works

Bell Anne Olivier (ed.) The Diary of Virginia Woolf, (London: Penguin Books ltd., 1983) in 5 volumes.
Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2005)
Gordon, Lyndall. A Writer’s Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984)
Nicholson, Nigel and Trautmann, Joanne (eds).The Letters of Virginia Woolf (London: The Hogarth Press, 1977-84)
Roe, Sue. Writing and Gender: Virginia Woolf’s Writing Practice (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990)
Rosenbaum, S. P. Virginia Woolf: Women &Fiction. The Manuscript Versions of A Room of One’s Own (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992)
Silver, Brenda R. Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983)
Woolf, Leonard. (ed.) Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Diary (London: The Hogarth Press, 1969)
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Ownand Three Guineas (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2000)
__________, Between the Acts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
__________, Moments of Being (London: The University of Sussex Press, 1976)
__________, Night and Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
__________, Orlando: A Biography (London: Penguin, 2000)
__________, Rainbow and Granite (London: The Hogarth Press, 1958)
__________, The Common Reader (London: Vintage, 2003)
__________, The Voyage Out (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
__________, The Waves (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2000)
__________, To the Lighthouse (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2000)