Monday, July 6, 2015

Hedgebrook, Day 12




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 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 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.

Virginia Woolf,  Orlando: A Biography


9 comments:

  1. Working in solitude: a necessary gift (as well as torment). Sending love to you.

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  2. I must be moderately familiar with the rigours of composition then.

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  3. yes...and when it finished and done and you sigh with relief...you begin to dream of the next one.

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  4. Yep, that's pretty accurate!

    Re. your question on my blog, I saw the Robert Frank story but I haven't read it yet. Hopefully I'll get to it tonight.

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  5. Thinking of you there and how you are probably laughing and crying.
    But that's good, right?

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  6. So true. And now you've given me the push I needed to return to Orlando - I left midway over a year ago and it's been out in full view beckoning ever since.

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