Virginia Woolf on writing

And the implications for blogging

I have been thinking about doing a post on solitude, and that got me to finally read Virginia Woolf’s essay entitled A Room of One’s Own, published in 1929. The solitude post will have to wait, as I was recently asked to provide some advice on writing at a workshop for young bloggers. So, I took another look at Woolf’s essay, this time focusing on writing tips, not solitude.

I plan to focus on two long quotations from Woolf’s essay. In each case, I’ll attempt to show how advice aimed at novelists might be applied to nonfiction.

1. Let’s begin with Woolf’s argument for androgynous writing:

Coleridge certainly did not mean, when he said that a great mind is androgynous, that it is a mind that has any special sympathy with women; a mind that takes up their cause or devotes itself to their interpretation. Perhaps the androgynous mind is less apt to make these distinctions than the single-sexed mind. He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided. In fact one goes back to Shakespeare’s mind as the type of the androgynous, of the man-womanly mind, though it would be impossible to say what Shakespeare thought of women. . . .

What, then, it amounts to, if this theory of the two sides of the mind holds good, is that virility has now become self-conscious—men, that is to say, are now writing only with the male side of their brains. It is a mistake for a woman to read them, for she will inevitably look for something that she will not find. It is the power of suggestion that one most misses, I thought, taking Mr B the critic in my hand and reading, very carefully and very dutifully, his remarks upon the art of poetry. Very able they were, acute and full of learning; but the trouble was that his feelings no longer communicated; his mind seemed separated into different chambers; not a sound carried from one to the other. Thus, when one takes a sentence of Mr B into the mind it falls plump to the ground—dead; but when one takes a sentence of Coleridge into the mind, it explodes and gives birth to all kinds of other ideas, and that is the only sort of writing of which one can say that it has the secret of perpetual life.

But whatever the reason may be, it is a fact that one must deplore. For it means—here I had come to rows of books by Mr Galsworthy and Mr Kipling—that some of the finest works of our greatest living writers fall upon deaf ears. Do what she will a woman cannot find in them that fountain of perpetual life which the critics assure her is there. It is not only that they celebrate male virtues, enforce male values and describe the world of men; it is that the emotion with which these books are permeated is to a woman incomprehensible. . . .

One must turn back to Shakespeare then, for Shakespeare was androgynous; and so were Keats and Sterne and Cowper and Lamb and Coleridge. Shelley perhaps was sexless. Milton and Ben Jonson had a dash too much of the male in them. So had Wordsworth and Tolstoi. In our time Proust was wholly androgynous, if not perhaps a little too much of a woman. But that failing is too rare for one to complain of it, since without some mixture of the kind the intellect seems to predominate and the other faculties of the mind harden and become barren.

Reading this reminded me of the way that the modern academy is increasingly siloed in “science” and “the humanities”. Back in the 1700s, people like David Hume and Adam Smith wrote on economics, philosophy, psychology and public policy. There was no clear line between the “hard” sciences and the “soft” humanities. In our contemporary culture, science is treated as being more masculine and the humanities are viewed as more feminine.

In the modern world, academics are encouraged to choose a side, either science or the humanities, and not wander across the line into another intellectual realm. It wasn’t until I started reading Deirdre McCloskey on methodology that I began to understand how this compartmentalization was leading to an increasingly sterile output. Woolf says something similar about art that is motivated by ideology:

At any rate, according to the newspapers, there is a certain anxiety about fiction in Italy. There has been a meeting of academicians whose object it is 'to develop the Italian novel'. 'Men famous by birth, or in finance, industry or the Fascist corporations' came together the other day and discussed the matter, and a telegram was sent to the Duce expressing the hope 'that the Fascist era would soon give birth to a poet worthy of it'. We may all join in that pious hope, but it is doubtful whether poetry can come of an incubator. Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father. The Fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horrid little abortion such as one sees in a glass jar in the museum of some county town. Such monsters never live long, it is said; one has never seen a prodigy of that sort cropping grass in a field. Two heads on one body do not make for length of life.

From McCloskey, I learned that both the humanities and the sciences produce useful knowledge, and that the two intellectual realms can complement each other in a way that provides for a deeper understanding of the world. McCloskey’s Bourgeois Virtues provides a good example of this synergy.

Marginal Revolution is my favorite blog, and this is partly because Tyler Cowen has an unusually deep understanding of both the social sciences and the humanities. It’s not so much that Tyler produces the best blog posts (I’d probably give that honor to Scott Alexander), rather that he and Alex Tabarrok have produced a sort of intellectual salon, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Marginal Revolution (and CWT) is a place where people can go to find well-informed commentary on many of the most interesting developments in a wide range of fields. It is impossible for me to imagine this sort of intellectual space being produced by a person that had concentrated solely on either the sciences or the humanities.

2. Woolf’s views on the importance of integrity also have implications for the world of blogging:

The whole structure, it is obvious, thinking back on any famous novel, is one of infinite complexity, because it is thus made up of so many different judgements, of so many different kinds of emotion. The wonder is that any book so composed holds together for more than a year or two, or can possibly mean to the English reader what it means for the Russian or the Chinese. But they do hold together occasionally very remarkably. And what holds them together in these rare instances of survival (I was thinking of War And Peace) is something that one calls integrity, though it has nothing to do with paying one’s bills or behaving honourably in an emergency. What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. Yes, one feels, I should never have thought that this could be so; I have never known people behaving like that. But you have convinced me that so it is, so it happens. One holds every phrase, every scene to the light as one reads—for Nature seems, very oddly, to have provided us with an inner light by which to judge of the novelist’s integrity or disintegrity. Or perhaps it is rather that Nature, in her most irrational mood, has traced in invisible ink on the walls of the mind a premonition which these great artists confirm; a sketch which only needs to be held to the fire of genius to become visible. When one so exposes it and sees it come to life one exclaims in rapture, But this is what I have always felt and known and desired! And one boils over with excitement, and, shutting the book even with a kind of reverence as if it were something very precious, a stand-by to return to as long as one lives, one puts it back on the shelf, I said, taking War And Peace and putting it back in its place. If, on the other hand, these poor sentences that one takes and tests rouse first a quick and eager response with their bright colouring and their dashing gestures but there they stop: something seems to check them in their development: or if they bring to light only a faint scribble in that corner and a blot over there, and nothing appears whole and entire, then one heaves a sigh of disappointment and says. Another failure. This novel has come to grief somewhere.

Integrity is also important in blogging. Scott Alexander’s extraordinary success at blogging is due to a number of factors, including creativity, strong analytical skills, and a great sense of humor. But none of that would be sufficient if readers didn’t trust him to treat evidence in an even-handed fashion.

When writing a blog post with a point of view, one is frequently tempted to present information in a one-sided fashion. Early on, I discovered that if you shade the truth by omitting certain relevant data, or cite misleading statistics, readers will almost invariably notice this fact and complain. I try to write posts in such a way that provides at least a degree of “steelmanning” the opposite point of view. What is the evidence that contradicts my claim? Nonetheless, I often fall well short of the ideal.

Scott Alexander is especially good at presenting both sides of an argument, so that the reader never worries that he’s intentionally shading the truth with misleading evidence. You might think this even-handed approach would make his posts less persuasive, and perhaps for some people that’s the case. But for Alexander’s typical (high IQ) reader, the even-handed approach pays dividends. His integrity gives his posts more credibility.

The following section of the passage quoted above is perhaps the best description I’ve read of what a blogger should be aiming for:

What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. Yes, one feels, I should never have thought that this could be so; I have never known people behaving like that. But you have convinced me that so it is, so it happens.

(Virginia Woolf painted by Roger Fry)

It always brings a smile to my face when a commenter explains a point to me that I suspect they got from a much earlier blog post of mine from years ago, a post they may have forgotten reading. But am I any different? How many of the ideas that I arrogantly assume are my own are actually derived from things I read years ago and tucked somewhere in the back of my mind?

BTW, I’ve often criticized the excesses of modern “wokism.” But if you are one of those conservatives that believe the woke are always wrong, please read A Room of One’s Own. You will discover that the woke feminists of the 1920s have been fully vindicated by history. They were correct; women were being treated shamefully.

OK, that’s what I got from Virginia Woolf. Here are a few other blogging suggestions off the top of my head:

1. Do a lot of reading—that’s where ideas come from. Read in all sorts of fields, even fields you might assume to be useless, such as philosophy. But also try to be an expert in at least one field.

2. Do a lot of writing, as writing helps one to think.

3. Think of blogging as a form of conversation. When you converse with people, you presumably are aware of your audience. That should also be true of blogging—think about who you are writing for.

4. Even a great novel or painting is a form of conversation, Artists are reacting to what other artists have done. A blogger just starting out should probably not be presenting grand theories of everything, rather one should start by reacting to what others are discussing.

5. People complained that I often “bury the lede”. So, I guess you shouldn’t do that. Give people an idea of where you are going if you want them to stick with the post—at least until you have enough of a reputation that they can trust you to go somewhere interesting.

6. Avoid a self-consciously literary style. Write as you’d speak.

7. Ask yourself: Is it possible I’ll regret this? How might this post be misinterpreted? You might want to set it aside for a day, then reread before posting. When I do so, I often end up cutting out things that might have brought me grief.

8. Personality flaws are exposed in blog posts, but writing also makes it easier to fix these flaws. Keep in mind that your critics are usually right (apart from trolls.) If a smart well-intentioned commenter says the post was unfair or mean-spirited, it usually is.

9. Words don’t just have literal meanings, they have connotations. The term ‘ignorant’ doesn’t mean stupid, but it has come to have that implication. Don’t think to yourself, “I should not have to tell readers that just because I claim a certain politician is an idiot, doesn’t mean that I view his supporters as stupid.” You do have to say that, even though logic would suggest it’s unnecessary.

In other words, because people are stupid it is important to reassure them that you don’t view them as stupid.

PS. As I was about to publish this post, I ran across an excellent Noah Smith post that raises issues related to those discussed above. Smith begins by discussing the hard problem of consciousness in humans, and then speculates as to what we might eventually be able to learn about whether AIs are conscious. He begins as follows:

At some point, maybe when you were a teenager, a question probably occurred to you: What if I’m actually the only real person in the world? What if everyone else around me is just a cleverly programmed automaton — a “p-zombie”, an NPC in a video game — and I’m the only one who can actually think?

It’s a scary question, for sure. You know you’re self-aware, but that’s about it — you aren’t telepathic, so you have no way of seeing into anyone else’s mind and knowing what it’s like to be them. Actually, it gets worse — you don’t even know if you were really self-aware five minutes ago. For all you know, you could have been created by a powerful computer and given a complete set of false memories.¹ The past version of you is just as alien to your currently self-aware self as any of the people around you.

This is known in philosophy as the “problem of other minds”. It’s closely related to the “hard problem of consciousness” — the question of how physical processes give rise to subjective experience. The problem of other minds means that the hard problem of consciousness will never fully be solved. Since you’ll never know whether other people are really conscious, you’ll never be able to get hard scientific evidence about why they’re conscious. You can never explain something if you don’t know if it’s true or not.

I like the way that Smith approaches the question of AI consciousness. I believe he’s right that we cannot resolve the AI issue until we figure out whether other humans are conscious. But I differ from Smith in one respect—I think we do know that other humans are conscious—not all humans, but at least a few of them.

When I was younger, I might have agreed with Smith. Do I know that there are other conscious beings? Can I really be sure? Ten years ago, I might have said no.

Today, I feel certain that there are other conscious beings. When I say “certain” I don’t mean metaphysical certitude, rather certain in the ordinary sense of the term, say 99.999% sure. And that’s good enough for me. But the more interesting question is: Why did I change my mind?

Ten years ago, I started reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six volume novel entitled My Struggle. Far more than any other book I had previous read, this book presented life as I experienced it. Not in the specifics—Knausgaard has a different personality from me and has a different set of experiences, rather in the sense of what it feels like to go through life. The book is often describing boring events in a way that is quite engrossing, and that pretty much what my life is like—lots of boring events that I found engrossing. Different situations, but the same subjective feelings. Don’t other novels do this? Not really, or at least not for me—not like My Struggle.

[The first, second and sixth volumes are the most engrossing, because those are closest to the present, where Knausgaard had to rely less on memory.]

So now I’ve gone from being a solopsist to a duopsist—if there is such a thing. The universe contains two consciousnesses, Karl and me. Seriously, once you establish that there is more than one, Occam’s Razor suggests that we ought to treat everyone as having a rich interior life.

I do understand that it’s kind of silly for me to cite My Struggle as evidence for other minds. Harold Bloom would probably have said that Hamlet had already convinced him that Shakespeare was conscious, and another reader might cite In Search of Lost Time as evidence that Proust was not a p-zombie. I’m late to the game.

People with relatively little interest in literature might assume that these famous books are merely higher quality examples of ordinary novels. I don’t think that’s right—they are qualitatively different. The sort of romance novel or detective story you see in an airport bookshop often could have been written by a computer. There is no way that My Struggle could have been written by a non-conscious machine. It is patently obvious to any reasonably discerning reader that it was written by a conscious being.

To be clear, this does not mean that AIs will never be able to write great novels. Indeed, I suspect that at some point in the future they might be capable of writing something analogous to Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun, which speculates as to what it would be like to be an AI. Except if this hypothetical great work of literature were actually written by an AI, then it would not be like Klara and the Sun, which is a human’s attempt at AI consciousness. Rather, it would explore AI consciousness from the inside. It would be an AI version of My Struggle, not an AI version of Klara and the Sun.

Smith says we should explore consciousness as a physical process:

We should try to figure out which physical processes give rise to consciousness in humans, and then figure out how to replicate those processes in an AI.

I’m referring to the Neural Correlates of Consciousness, or NCC.⁶ This is the question of what exactly the brain is doing that makes humans conscious. Unless some extremely weird quantum stuff is going on, human consciousness must be a phenomenon generated by a brain — the brain goes zoop zap zerp in some electrical pattern, and people become self-aware. The NCC is just the particular zoop zap zerp that makes the magic happen.

I believe that we should explore AI consciousness by looking at the sort of novels that they write. As long as AI art is imitative of human art, as long as AI novels feel like they were written by a committee of corporate hacks, then we have no evidence that AIs have an interior life. But if and when AIs start writing novels with plots like Klara and the Sun but the sort of uncannily rich and convincing depiction of subjectivity that you get in My Struggle, then we can assume that they are indeed conscious, and are deserving of the machine equivalent of human rights.

(I emphasize the term ‘uncannily’ for a reason—it refers to a sort of strangeness that is authentic, not faked. Beyond clichés. It’s a way of distinguishing great novels from pulp fiction. Every great novel is strange.)