Appreciating fiction, according to Virginia Woolf

APPRECIATING FICTION: Although the quote was found what some might describe as an unlikely context – Giles Harvey's post on his learning to appreciate football – I've discovered that Virginia Woolf had some pertinent advice for those wishing to understand and appreciate great novelists. It is reproduced in the following lines (aptly headlined as our quote of the day).

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a novelist is doing is not to read, but to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words. Recall, then, some event that has left a distinct impression on you—how at the corner of the street, perhaps, you passed two people talking. A tree shook; an electric light danced; the tone of the talk was comic, but also tragic; a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that moment. But when you attempt to reconstruct it in words, you will find that it breaks into a thousand conflicting impressions. Some must be subdued; others emphasised; in the process you will lose, probably, all grasp upon the emotion itself. Then turn from your blurred and littered pages to the opening pages of some great novelist—Defoe, Jane Austen, Hardy. Now you will be better able to appreciate their mastery." – Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book.