Maria Popova examines "the artist’s universal and necessary dance with fear" via a quote from Woolf's novel Orlando: "Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished."
October 4, 2015
![Virginia Woolf painting By Christiaan Tonnis (flickr) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AVirginia_Woolf_Painting.jpg){kind=link}