Friday, January 27, 2006

Writing machine

In the 1927 script for a radio debate between Virginia and Leonard Woolf (reprinted in the January 2006 PMLA), Virginia Woolf says these words:

You say that too many people write. I say, on the contrary, not enough people write, but the people who do write write too many books. Most people have it in them to write one good book; many people can write fifteen or sixteen good books; but no one—not even Shakespeare himself—can write fifty or sixty good books. Yet some of our novelists have already written over 100 volumes. Once a writer starts writing, nothing can stop him. On he goes year after year, season after season. He ceases to be a human being: he becomes a machine into which you put a ream of paper in August and out drops a novel in October. It would greatly improve most people’s writing if they were forced to stop now and then and take up some other occupation. Ideas and images and words themselves become stale when they are always made by the same sort of people living the same sort of lives.

Which raises the question: would Virginia Woolf have written a blog?

1 comment:

Laura said...

I don't think she would have had a blog, but I think that she would have encouraged others to. She seems to believe that there is at least one good book in everyone. The problem is sorting through the dross to get to that book. Yes, she would have encouraged people to blog, but she would not have actually READ the blogs unless being forced at gunpoint (or paid, which is the same thing).