Book Review: A Writer's Diary by Virginia Woolf

A Writer's Diary by Virginia Woolf

As I sifted through the paraphernalia of Virginia Woolf’s diary, I caught a glimpse into the mind and life of a writer. I peered into the vast lair of her restless mind and collected bits and bobs to accommodate in my own writing process.

Some days, her diary bubbles with enthusiasm while other days she is feeling dark, depressed, and melancholic, often resting in her bed for days and days, reading a book and enjoying her favourite coffee, cigarettes, and biscuits with her husband Leonard.

“If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy,”

she wrote in her diary. She also wrote about her nature walks, tea times, excursions on London city streets, her observations of people around her, and newspaper reviews of her books. She liked to read a lot.

Woolf started writing diary in her young thirties and wrote till 1941. Her last diary entry dates to four days before she died of suicide. Her posthumous book “Writer’s Diary” chronicles her diary entries spanning from 1915 to 1941, although many details from her original notebooks have been edited and erased as they’re too personal.

According to her diary, she doesn’t consider “writing diary” as “actual writing,” but she says it surely is an allowance for days when you can’t really sit down to write. And if you let your mind “gallop” and “swing” on the notebook’s page, you may as well end up discovering some “diamonds in the dustheap” of your subconscious mind.

Her writing was based on the inner joy she derived from the writing process. The early diary entries in the book illustrate that she found writing to be “hard work,” but despite that she felt it was pleasant, something she believed was the secret to getting the most out of one’s brain.

“At forty I am beginning to learn the mechanism of my own brain—how to get the greatest amount of pleasure and work out of it. The secret is I think always so to contrive that work is pleasant.”

Although her diary depicts that she was highly affected by both positive and negative reviews, she innately believed that she would never write to please anyone.

“I shall never write to ‘please,’ to convert; now am entirely and for ever my own mistress.”

“I am an outsider. I can take my way: experiment with my imagination in my own way. The pack may howl, but it shall never catch me. And even if the pack—reviewers, friends, enemies—pays me no attention or sneers, still I'm free.”

She also mentions sometimes reading her diary with a slightly “guilty intensity” as one often reads one’s own diary. But she says that the habit of writing diary is a good practice. “It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do, I must make the most direct and instant shots at my object, and thus have to lay hands on words, choose them and shoot them with no more pause than is needed to put my pen in the ink.”

Although the detailed process of how she actually wrote was not recorded in her diary, but sometimes she wrote according to a daily word count, while other times, she just decided to finish a piece such as a poem or a magazine article. She also didn’t seem to record her story ideas in her diary, or if she did, they have been edited out. She often took feedback of her drafts from her husband who regularly read her writings.

Overall, I found the “Writer’s Diary” by Virginia Woolf to be an interesting read. Even though I don’t yet completely know about how exactly she got her story ideas and how she actually wrote her books, but I certainly learned the way to write my own diary, in a way that reflects my writing-related processes, my thoughts after reading a book, and tidbits expressing my thoughts and daily experiences.

“I can write and write and write now; the happiest feeling in the world!”

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