Manifesto

Virginia Woolf (today) on writing

A shopping list is writing, in that sense -- two pounds of potatoes, a raw chicken, and a bag of salad. But when you ask me what is writing, I think you mean literature. Writing that expresses something that scratches the surface of the shopping lift. If writing were words on a page, then a writer could simply catalogue everyday details, like so much dust and turnips. But the true question is who the character, who the author is, who is seeing those details.

What is Mrs. Brown thinking as she moves through the supermarket, caressing the carcasses of the fowls that will become the preparations for her evening's feast? When she sees the potatoes, does she think of the squashed noses of her piggy relatives, whose faces will hang over their plates later in the day, complaining that the meat is too tough?

Even an essay is in the mind of a character, if only the mind of an author. An essayist passes through the world, and notes sundry details, and gives the details vividness, meaning, and emotion through the prism of his or her consciousness. The challenge of writing is that it must be imaginative (else why read at all, if it were merely a record of reality) but to use the imaginative process in such a fashion that it still has some ties to reality, so the reader can comprehend the author's meaning.

Writing must feel truthful, but go beyond a shopping list, and the key to creating that sense of truth is character, either in fiction portraying a compelling character, or in nonfiction creating a compelling authorial voice with whom the reader to identify. Dull writing is dangerous, writing that turns a person off of literature, and turns the reader off of connecting with other people's ideas that seem unfamiliar, or worse, trite. Writing should make the unfamiliar feel familiar, and the familiar seem new. The ultimate responsibility of every artist is not to bore, and to tell the truth -- this lesson is learned through the writer's own positive and negative experiences in life and literature, which hopefully inspire the author to take readers out of the prisons of their own consciousness for a moment, and to see the world through the eyes of another, anew