Writing, as practiced by Virginia Woolf

 When Virginia Woolf was 27, she kept a notebook for sketches.

It’s the kind of book everyone who wants to write should keep. If some dean of a liberal arts college lost her mind and assigned me to teach a course in freshman composition, that’s the way I’d do it.

I’d tell the students: If you want to write, go get on the bus. Go do things, see things, observe things. Then come back and write about them.

It’s what reporters do, and for decades I was a newspaper editor, that is, a teacher of reporters.

I think everyone who is interested in writing should take a stab at reporting — at observing and then sketching what you saw and heard.

Woolf observed that artists keep sketchbooks. They practice capturing visual details. She was looking for something analogous in these written sketches.

The title piece in the collection I have is “Carlyle’s House.” Woolf got on the bus and went to see the house of that great, cantankerous thinker Thomas Carlyle.

She noticed the portraits of Carlyle’s wife, Jane, and wondered whether Mrs. Carlyle would have tolerated the visitors. Woolf caught what was absent from the house, which had become a museum: the bright little “contrivances.” That was Thomas Carlyle’s word for his wife’s efforts to spruce up the place.

Woolf imagined Mrs. Carlyle telling about her day to Mr. Carlyle, who listened, smoking his pipe.

“Did one always feel a coldness between them? The only connection the flash of intellect. I imagine so.”

• Source: Virginia Woolf, Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches; London: Hesperus Press, 2003. The seven sketches are short, 18 pages total. Hesperus had a series called 100 Pages, each of which about 100 pages long — a good size for a book, in my view. This is one of them. The book has a forward by Doris Lessing and an introduction, notes and commentary by David Bradshaw of Oxford.