Writing in two steps

 I’ve been reading two books on writers I admire. Virginia Woolf and Stephen Crane were different — probably incompatible — personalities, but as writers they were after the same thing, I think.

Yesterday’s note on Woolf was about her habit of keeping a notebook for sketches in words. She practiced sketching, just as a visual artist keeps a sketchbook to practice capturing visual details.

David Bradshaw, the Oxford fellow who wrote the introduction to the collection, says the sketches are “new evidence of Woolf’s enduring professional urge to train her ‘eye & hand’, to pick up her pen and record anything which might one day be of use in her fiction.”

He quotes a journal entry from 1908 in which Woolf said she wanted “to write not only with the eye, but with the mind; and discover real things beneath the show.”

Compare that with what Paul Auster calls the “Crane project.” Here’s Auster’s description: “ … at the heart of his writing the keenest attention is given to the vagaries of the perceived world, the eye looking out and trying to make sense of what it sees and the mind looking inward at the jumble of contradictory impulses and emotions that continually bombard consciousness …”

To me, it’s the same two-step project. First, you report an event, paying attention to the details. Second, you look inside yourself for meaning, context, concepts — tools that can help the observer and her readers make sense of what’s been witnessed.

It has always amazed me that some people think you can skip step 1.

To my eye, Woolf’s best sketch was “Divorce Courts.” Although she was not employed as a reporter, she went to court to hear the case of an Anglican minister whose wife alleged cruelty.

Auster’s comments were about a story that Crane wrote for Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper The New York World called “The Devil’s Acre.” Crane went to Sing Sing to see the electric chair and the graveyard for prisoners.

• Sources: Virginia Woolf, Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches; London: Hesperus Press, 2003. Paul Auster, Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane; New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2021.