Run-ons & Spotlights

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Virginia Woolf knocked out sentences that could stand alone as their own atomic essays. Upwards of 200 words, the sights, and sounds, and things she heard, they burst out from her mind, in between commas and semi-colons, giving you the chance to vacation in her daydreams. Woolf would "sketch" scenes, but her British rambles had a method. She was a master at building patterns and then breaking them, in a way that was unexpected.

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THAT! Jesus, that?

She was a comedian, but joked through beauty and horror. Her work is filled with dramatic run-ons, where all signs point in one direction, but then as soon as you feel oriented, she hits you with a curveball.

"Mrs. Dalloway" is recognized as the origin of stream-of-consciousness novels. Behind the rambles, she had an intuitive sense of how to throw in logic twists, which is where she often hid her most important ideas.

By analyzing a few of her sentences, we can learn how to use structure to shine spotlights on the ideas that matter.

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