IF A WRITER WERE FREE

If a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not on convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, not tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of giglamps symmetrically arranged, but a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown an uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration of complexity it may display, with a little mixture of the alien and external as possible?  ---Virginia Woolf