”Look within and life, it
seems, is very far from being "like this". Examine for a moment an
ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions--trivial,
fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides
they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they
shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls
differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so
that, 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
upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no 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 gig
lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent
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 and
uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with
as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? ”
(Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction)