We follow a painter as she makes the last mark on her canvas. She glances about… draws a line… appraises the results…
And the paragraph is pure Woolf:
- It combines her favourite subjects (the interior life of an artist)
- It features her signature punctuation mark (the semi-colon)
- It glistens with her grand vocabulary (‘extreme fatigue’)
But what really excites me is the movement from observation to action to thought.
Woolf captured the scene like she was pushing a movie camera. She let events and reflections unfold in real time.
But better than a roving camera, Woolf’s prose records thoughts as well as actions and their setting.
Holding those three aspects of a scene in balance, Woolf ended one of her most popular books — To The Lighthouse.
Let us hope she set down her pen and sighed, ‘I have had my vision.’
Aidan Clifford writes for Pinstripe Poets – artists who love their day jobs. This post is part of a series called ‘Write like the Greats’. See the rest here.
