This essay is an extract from The Common Reader,( a collection of essay) written by Virginia Woolf.

The topic is Woolf’s ideas about the way to write fiction. The argumentation starts showing the readers the concept of vagueness of literary criticism. Virginia Woolf opinion is that traditional fiction misses to convey to reader what real life is like.

Virginia Woolf states that traditional novel cn no  longer be written according to traditional standards . She is criticizing the traditional novel because the traditional way to write is NOT suitable to render what readers are looking for. The writer expresses the fatigue of writing and the effort is compared to  the one you make when  you have to build something. Virginia Woolf invites to be careful and not to concentrate one's  the efforts on the wrong things.

The writer would like the novelists to express the sense of life as he pleases but on the contrary  they seem ruled by a tyrant who forces them to follow a plot, comedy, figures, love interests. The metaphor of the tyrant refers to the traditional conventions to which novelists feel subdued and owing to which they loose their writing freedom.

The writers are forced by conventions and for this reason Virginia Woolf would like novels to be more realistic that is very close to the true sense of life with its myriad of impressions, feelings and emotions where characters'inner life is the most relevant element.