The extract is taken from "Modern Fiction" in The Common Reader, a critical essay written by Virginia Woolf. In the first sequence Virginia Woolf critics the traditional way to write a novel. The writer seems to be forced by a tyrant to product a novel with a long plot, characters definited in all them features and situations losing in this labour the truth imagine of life.
In the second sequence Virginia Woolf expresses her idea about novelist's role linked with her idea of life. Life is not definited, is not one emotion but unlimited emotions, "an incessant shower of innumerable atoms" she writes. Novelist's role is to express this variability of life without follow the convention of writing.