While Woolf was in the early stages of To The Lighthouse, in the autumn of 1925, she was preparing a lecture called 'How Should One Read a Book?'. In it she compares the thirty-two chapters of a novel to 'an attempt to make something as formal and controlled as a building: but words are more impalpable than bricks'. Try, she suggests, to write on 'some event that has left a distinct impression on you', when 'a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that moment'. As soon as you attempt to 'reconstruct' it in words, you will find that it 'breaks into a thousand conflicting impressions'.
—Hermione Lee, Introduction to To The Lighthouse
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