Woolf writes that keeping a rapid, unjudged diary trains a writer to throw words down without stopping to criticise, and that this looseness carries over into serious work by loosening the ligaments that over-care has stiffened. The speed matters: writing faster than one can judge lets accidental finds surface that deliberate composition would have excluded.
Woolf describes a recurring collapse of mood in the interval after delivering a finished book and before readers respond, when the work feels simultaneously done and worthless. She observes that the depression is predictable enough to be named in advance, which partly disarms it: knowing the low is structural rather than evidential changes how much weight she gives it.
Woolf treats individual reviews less as judgements of quality than as data about her own reaction to being judged, noting that praise and blame affect her for roughly the same short span before the next sentence of her own work reclaims her. The useful question is not whether a critic is right but how long their verdict is allowed to occupy her.
Woolf records that she conceived The Waves not from a plot or characters but from a persistent image of fins turning in water and an underlying rhythm she had to find before she could write a word. She drafted to catch that rhythm first and fitted meaning to it afterward, treating the book's cadence as the thing given and its sense as the thing constructed.