I'm going to make Virginia Woolf my guide for now. Why Virginia? She's a great writer. She's witty. She's an atheist and a suicide so she fits the criteria.
I will start by looking at some of her writing--and showing you an example. The first thing I want to do is to establish a kind of voice for my guide.
I will also be establishing a voice for my narrator. Remember, your narrator is not the same as you. It can have some things in common with you, but it is not you. If you make the narrator yourself, you will be too restrained. I'm an experienced writer, so you can trust me on that. My narrator will be wittier than I am, more self-confident, and definitely outgoing. She will be a good match for the likes of Virginia Woolf. The real me would probably be speechless in such esteemed company. The real me would be searching for witty things to say but only thinking of the inane things instead. The real me would think of all kinds of witty things to say after the encounter has ended and would probably have talked too much or too little and revealed all the wrong kinds of things. The real me is pretty shy around adults.
The fictional me, however, has time to think. I can think of all the witty things to say because I have time and can actually EDIT what I say. I love and hate editing. Whether I love or hate it, it's work and one of the main reasons for assigning this project.
Now, let me take a look at some of my favorite passages by Virginia Woolf and analyzing them in order to establish a voice for my guide:
From the opening of Woolf's novel, Mrs. Dalloway:
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer's men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning--fresh as if issued to children on a beach.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, "Musing among the vegetables?" --was that it?--"I prefer men to cauliflowers" --was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on the terrace--Peter Walsh....
She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall's van to pass. A charming woman, Scrope Purvis thought her (knowing her as one does know people who live next door to one in Westminster); a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness. There she perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright.
For having lived in Westminster--how many years now? over twenty, --one feels in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said by influence) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands, barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June (3-4).
What do I love about Woolf? The diction, the rhythms, the way she puts me into the moment, even into her very thoughts. I love the way she loves and celebrates her city--London.
