Keynes’s advice on writing

 Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes were having tea. He said to her: “You should pretend to write about real people and make it all up.”

It’s the smallest of stories, hardly an anecdote, but I like it for two reasons.

First, it shows how little we pay attention to what others say. This was Woolf’s point in making a note in her diary. She liked to have tea with people because it was an excuse for conversation. She was interested in what other people had to say, including this bit of advice — almost an oracle — on writing.

Second, the advice suggests precisely the kind of story I like. I’ve mentioned Guy Davenport’s story “John Charles Tapner” (Sept. 23, 2021 and March 19, 2022) as an example of the kind of story I like to read. The story is based on a historical event: Victor Hugo’s arrival on the isle of Guernsey to investigate an execution. Hugo was wealthy, outrageous and world famous. He hated capital punishment. And so his arrival in an isolated, rural, conservative place to meet people who had executed a criminal was an encounter.

We know a bit of the story through history. But we can know it in a much more entertaining way through Davenport’s imagining of it.

• Source: Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, entry for May 26, 1921.