This article offers some selections from Woolf’s diaries and
commentary on the mental state and creative process. A quote I liked: “Melancholy diminishes as I
write. Why then don’t I write it down oftener? Well, one’s vanity forbids. I
want to appear a success even to myself. Yet I don’t get to the bottom of it.”
Although I have always loved writing and loved even more the idea of being a
disciplined diarist with journals filled with my very own words and my life
neatly organized, I have had little success in fulfilling that fantasy. I own
dozens of beautiful journals given to me by well-meaning friends and family who
know my interests and want to encourage me to create, but most of them are
empty, or else have a few pages written in (usually torn out within a few
days). I love journals and the idea of using them, but they scare me with the
promise of what I could create with them. I find it infinitely easier to write
my thoughts down in private blogs or other online spaces, or notebooks that are
cheap and ugly and unlikely to last—the temporary reduces the threat of
embarrassment. I can’t bring myself to ‘ruin’ a well-crafted notebook, even if
it was created specifically to hold my mistakes. They make me feel as though my
private thoughts must be polished and coherent and fully-formed from the start.
And my writing is irregular, precisely because of the problem that Woolf nods
to above. It is all too easy to become fixated on having a literary diary which
recounts stories of your interesting and sophisticated life rather than the
ordinary, mundane topics of most diaries. At that point it is no longer a diary
but an exhibit, something artificial, something on display. In order for me to
be able to write, certain conditions must be in place to remove that obligation
to exhibition. I think all of us feel that paradox she underscores of the need
to overcome emotional hurdles and stressors in order to be able to write, which
is only fully possible through practice and constantly writing, constantly
creating.
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