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More generally, I believe that the sense I have of writing—and all the struggles it involves—has to do with the satisfaction of staying beautifully within the margins and, at the same time, with the impression of loss, of waste, because of that success.
The struggle is due to the fact that the present—the entire present, even that of the “I” who writes, letter by letter—can’t maintain with clarity the thought-vision, which always comes before, is always the past, and therefore tends to be blotted out.
For a woman who has something to say, does it really take a miracle—I said to myself—to dissolve the margins within which nature has enclosed her and show herself in her own words to the world?
When I finished a story, I was pleased, having the impression that it had come out perfectly; and yet I felt that it wasn’t I who had written it—that is, not the excited I, ready for anything, who was called to write, and who during the entire draft had seemed to be hidden in the words—but another I, who, tightly disciplined, had found convenient pathways solely in order to say: look, see what fine sentences I’ve written, what beautiful images, the story is finished, praise me.
first, the act of writing is a pure tempting of fate; second, what writing captures doesn’t pass through the sieve of a singular I, solidly planted in everyday life, but is twenty people, that is, a number thrown out there to say: when I write, not even I know who I am.
Woolf’s idea seems clear: writing is camping out in her own brain, without getting lost in the very numerous, varied, inferior modalities with which every day, as Virginia, she lives a raw life.
For me true writing is that: not an elegant, studied gesture but a convulsive act.
Over time, writing has come to mean giving shape to a permanent balancing and unbalancing of myself, arranging fragments in a frame and waiting to mix them up.
Beautiful writing becomes beautiful when it loses its harmony and has the desperate power of the ugly.
