"Writing is Effort: Writing is Despair."

Quotes about the creative process from Virginia Woolf’s diary.

As a writer, weaver, and lifelong journal keeper, I love reading the published diaries of other creatives. I’ve read the diaries of Sylvia Plath, May Sarton, Frida Kahlo, and now Virginia Woolf. (Anais Nin’s is next and am open to suggestions for others!) 

I think this fascination with getting to read the behind-the-scenes of others’ creative lives comes from a sense that they have figured out something I haven’t. It’s also, I think, why “How I grew my Substack” posts are popular, and why the daily routines of artists living and gone are so fascinating. Reading their private thoughts and studying their habits might provide a roadmap for how to imitate their creative practices and therefore, creative success. 

Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary is a reminder that even the most prolific, widely respected authors are fumbling around in the dark of their minds, struggling with their habits, and feeling that they’re not doing enough. It was a reminder that making art is hard, especially when it’s your job, and that despite that immense difficulty, for some like Virginia Woolf, it is necessary. (Multiple times she swears she is done writing long, difficult novels until the idea for another takes hold and won’t let her go.) There is often nothing magical or romantic about the writing process, and though it has glimpses of joy and beauty, it is hard work.

I’ve pulled out some of my favorite quotes about writing from A Writer’s Diary to share with you. Apply them to making any kind of art. They are funny and dramatic and true. I think the best lesson I learned from reading Woolf’s diary is to keep a record of the personal journey that we travel when immersed in a creative project. To note the moments of euphoria and moments of despair so that when it comes time to start the next book or collection or essay, we know what to expect so we can ride the waves of disheartenment and glee, and get our work done.  

On Writing

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

“Writing is effort: writing is despair.”

“An idea. All writers are unhappy.”

“The truth is that writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial.”

On Keeping a Diary

“What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes to my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk … in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced …”

“If I stopped and took thought, it [the diary] would never be written at all; and the advantage of the method is that it sweeps up accidentally several stray matters which I should exclude if I hesitated, but which are the diamonds of the dustheap.”

On Writing Books

“A note: despair at the badness of the book: can’t think how I ever could write such stuff—and with such excitement: that’s yesterday: today I think it’s good again. A note by way of advising other Virginias with other books that this is the way of the thing: up down up down—and Lord knows the truth.”

“I had to give up writing The Years this morning … can’t pump up a word. Yet I can see, just, that something’s there; so I shall wait, a day or two, and let the well fill. It has to be damned deep this time.” 

“Then I set to in despair, thought of throwing it away, but went on typing. After an hour, the line began to tauten. Yesterday I read it again; and I think it might be my best book.”

*The added emphasis in this essay is my own.