Virginia Woolf’s Writing Routine, November, 2022 EDITION
'Times Literary Supplement (TLS) sends me one novel every week; which has to be read on Sunday, written on Monday, and printed on Friday.’ - wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary in November 1905.
For 30 years, Woolf used to receive a book on Friday; read it by Sunday; write 1500 words by Wednesday; so it could be edited and published by Friday. She repeated this routine almost every week for 30 years.
I felt ashamed of myself when I read about this in the introduction to Woolf’s reviews written by Francesca Wade. ‘Woolf received, read and wrote book reviews every week.’ - I thought to myself - ‘I struggle to do this monthly for my YouTube channel, let alone weekly for a prestigious publication such as TLS.’
What calmed my sense of shame down was the realisation that there is not a single writer at TLS today who writes reviews every single week, the way Woolf did it back in 1905.
My serenity, however, was only temporary since I wanted to find out ‘the secret’ behind Woolf’s superhuman productivity.
It didn’t take me long to discover that this ‘secret’ is not in Woolf’s productivity system, and not even in her daily routine (though important), but in what motivated her to write.
Woolf started writing her reviews in February 1905, after meeting Bruce Richmond -the editor of the TLS - at a party two months earlier. She described Richmond as ‘a restless vivacious little man’.
Under his tutelage, according to Francesca Wade , the weekly circulation of the eight-page appendage to the Times reached 20,000 copies and, it became acknowledged, in the words of T.S.Eliot, as ‘the most respected and most respectable literary periodical’ of its day.
You and I live in the age of hyper-connectivity. Today, each of us can write a newsletter, record a podcast or create a Youtube channel to tell our stories. It’s easy for us to forget that just two decades ago it was immensely difficult to get our voices heard by someone other than our friends.
For Virginia Woolf to write for TLS meant to get the voice of her sharp intelligence and of her deep passion for books to be heard by 20,000 weekly readers. You can imagine what a huge privilege this was for her and any other writer. It also meant getting paid for what she loved to do.
‘I was transformed from a girl in a bedroom with a pen in her hand into a professional woman.’ - Woolf wrote in her journal.
In her reviews, she attempted to get a fuller understanding of ‘the novel as form’.
She imagined her audience as ‘busy people catching trains in the morning or .. tired people coming home in the evening’
Her role, as she saw it, was to share her own enthusiasms with her audience, to acknowledge and celebrate the influence of her own ‘cranks’, tastes and interests as she guided them ‘to enter into the mind of the writer; ‘to see each work of art by self, and to judge how far each artist has succeeded in his aim.’ ~ Francesca Wade.
The real work of art, in Woolf’s opinion, comes alive on encountering a reader and changes with him. A book isn’t written a masterpiece, it becomes one.
(Note: More on what makes something ‘a real work of art’ you can find here)
A great book could be defined as a book at each fresh reading of which we notice a change in what it means to us.
Speaking from my own experience, I can say that I re-read Dante’s Divine Comedy every year and each year it reveals something new to myself… about myself.
In her journal, Woolf wrote that her reviewing ‘is act of testifying before I die to the great fun & pleasure my habit of reading has given me'
When Bruce Richmond retired in May 1938, Virginia Woolf mourned the end of her ‘30 year connection’ with him in her diaries.
‘I learnt a lot of my craft writing for him: how to compress; how to enliven; and also was made to read with a pen and notebook, seriously’
Today we study geniuses as if they were (or are) productivity machines. That’s why we often use words like ‘productivity’ or ‘efficiency’ when we try to explain how a writer or an artist was so prolific throughout their lives.
We look at Picasso, for example, and wonder how did he manage to create 50,000 paintings in his lifetime. We try to find the answers by looking into his daily routine, but you can copy Picasso’s daily rituals and still not be as prolific as he was.
The truth is that passion is proven to be the most loyal productivity system of any artist.
The secret to Woolf’s ability to read, write, edit and publish an article a week, hence, lied not in her daily routine or a productivity system, but in her passion for reading and her desire to get heard.
Two priceless pleasures she couldn’t live without.
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