Yet I really must write a book about facts once in a way. And I cant keep grinding at fiction, which however goes easier this last lap than before.
During this month of magical writing ,, I’ve let my French translation and French writing slide (a lack of discipline or will, or maybe that’s the same thing). V.W. writes : “Heres my book in French. I daresay it reads better in French.” A second or third writing does seem to do the trick. The “facts” that V.W. mentions (see 16 Nov 1923) are the details of everyday life it seems. Visits with Hugh Walpole and with Edward Lytton, a trip to the Tate. (Up for two hours now and all I’ve done is read a few pages, make a few notes, and write this paragraph. How will I ever … ?) Not that I want to write a book of facts or even about facts, but for the past few days I’ve felt like I should write more plainly about what … the ideas that swirl and congeal and then dissolve again, I can feel them inside me with labels attached, keywords to approximate a filing system, a record of connections, but what do all the connections add up to? Gee whiz! I feel that I should write poems, so why don’t I write them? I feel I should work on my French so that one day I will be able to translate Jacques Roubaud’s the great fire of london. and why not start this morning? The big fat book, all 1666 pages of it, is right there. No time like the present! / “Now I lose interest in these facts, much as I do in writing my novels, & thus have to find a way out of saying them.” Yes, I want to write my novels. I do enjoy writing my novels once I’m writing them. Getting started each morning is the most difficult part, but I have a few tricks : just begin typing or moving the pen across the paper, it’s almost as if I can’t think before I am writing, the thinking and the writing must come together, at the same time. If I think : what shall I write about now? nothing happens. But if I type a few words, anything really, then the rest seem to follow — like Moses striking that rock in the desert with his staff. Whether those words are worth anything is another consideration, but it’s easier to throw something away than it is to throw nothing away.