Month: January 2011

  • The Woolf Pack and Mentor

    I once had the pleasure of listening to Dan Lazar, of The Writers House Agency, present his impression of writing and writers. He said one thing that has stuck with me ever since: “Great writers write in packs.” Maybe it’s because I just got back from one of my own pack meetings, but I believe…

  • Google Your Name Much?

    “Reflection: It is presumably a bad thing to look through articles, reviews, etc. to find one’s own name. Yet I often do.”~Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary While reading through Woolf’s diary, it’s easy to conclude: It’s good Virginia Woolf did not live in the time of Google or Amazon Reviews. Because, holy moly! The girl…

  • Birthday Facts Anyone?

    Just found this wonderful run-down via the Huffington Post: 59 Things You Didn’t Know About Virginia Woolf The list was put together in honor of Woolf’s birthday. Didn’t know she took longer than average to form coherent sentences? Well, I’d say she made up for it. Enjoy!

  • Your Form is Showing, or Is It?

    Deciding to plunge forward on a frustrating piece is one of the most difficult, and most common, decisions a writer must make. If a character isn’t cooperating, if a POV isn’t functioning, if there’s that intangible something telling you that the piece is suffering, it can be hard to convince yourself to press on. After…

  • Writing Schedules!

    We all do it, and now we can count Virginia Woolf among the ranks of “Writers Who Obsessively Plan About When To Get Stuff Done!” Take for example: “But my mind is full of The Hours [Mrs. Dalloway]. I am now saying that I will write at it for 4 months, June, July, August and…

  • Dangers of the Diary

    Virginia Woolf kept a diary. In 1954, her husband, Leonard Woolf released the portions of her diary that involved her writing and her process. This meant that he had to wade through — wait for it — 26 book-length volumes of a loosely kept diary in order to find all those nuggets. Now, I know…

  • More In-Depth Than I Can Do

    As I’ve been working through Virginia Woolf, it occured to me that there are many readers, students, scholars, and other various literati professionals out there who are studying Woolf, her work and her impact. While I try to be as in-depth and accurate as possible, I also realize that my posts are more about my…

  • Long, Luxurious Sentences; The Use of Semi-Colons

    Kurt Vonnegut may argue that semi-colons only prove that you’ve been to college, but apparently Virginia Woolf never got that message. Her prose is littered with the things. While the semi-colons are used with abandon, they do seem to serve a rhetorical purpose in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Namely: There is always One More Thing.…