In the draft, I had an aside about the importance of a room of one’s own with a lock. My thought? A room of one’s own, with a lock, and without a computer, phone, or interruptions. But, yesterday morning, and again this morning, I re-read Virginia Woolf’s famous essay. Not only is it a feminist critique of the materiality of artistic creation and the ways in which women have been excluded for centuries. But in Woolf’s words, and in the story she weaves, you can also begin to see the glimmers of a method to fiction.
The walking and daydreaming, the trespassing on lawns, the lunches, the attempts to go to libraries, the walks before dinner and the remembering of snippets of ideas, of poems. The walks and strolls across in Oxbridge.
But it’s also the next day, and other days, of being in the room and taking books down and putting them back on the shelves, of going to the library and reading with a notebook, and of misremembered lines and lost quotations, and the concentration that goes into the work.
Even as I was doing that, I had my daughter behind me, asleep on the couch at 4 o’clock in the morning because she couldn’t sleep. She woke up early. I cuddled her. She fell back into bed.
And as I was writing, there were four or five messages. Running partners. Dentist appointments. Concentration.
But there’s also a bricolage in there.
Pulling down books. Looking at shelves. Going to the library for ideas.
Pulling down books. Looking at shelves. Going to the library to get ideas.
I read in the introduction to the 2000 Penguin edition that on the day she gave the lecture she wrote:
“My ambition is, from this very moment—eight minutes to six, on Saturday evening—to attain complete concentration again.”
Total concentration! It takes a room and money (CAD$70,000 in Canadian money, I’m guessing), and I know it helps to be white.
Total concentration! It takes a room and money (CAD$70,000 in Canadian money, I’m guessing), and I know it helps to be white and a man.
But a walk, and lunch, and time, and concentration are best achieved without the technology in my pocket. Which is its own difficulty.