Writing, in a nutshell, is hard. Heck, even the nutshell is hard. Understanding what it means to you, as the writer, is not a something set in stone; the process is ever-evolving, ever-shifting, ever-surprising, and, can I just add, terrifying. You write a blog post, you hit publish, and then you wake up the next morning to the realization that everything you just thought and wrote was total horseshit. Case in point, Monday’s post about Victorian era women and my own thoughts about weddings, rings, and the whole nine yards? I’ve been stuck in a loop of could’ve/should’ve. Did I really mean what I said? Did I think that through thoroughly before I sent it out into the ether? What if, heaven forbid, someone were to actually read it?
But, I suppose, this whole blogging thing is supposed to be a living, breathing form of writing, which is to say that some imagined reader doesn’t necessarily want a well documented essay on the vindication of women in the Victorian era, and, besides, Victorian scholar, I am not. I say this because today I have spent in the realization that the prescribed literary “ideal” that is Victorian courtship etiquette creates too much of a generalization, i.e. we tend to put things into neat little historical buckets and want all people to have behaved in the same way, ascribing to the same weird ideologies created by Someone. In short, I know not all Victorian romancers followed some bulleted list of conduct, and while there would certainly have been taboos, the Victorians were not robots. (I know, I know, an anachronism to apply robotics to the 19th century.)
Writing makes me feel naked, which probably means its useful to do in that “nothing worthwhile is easy” kind of a way. In the short time that I’ve been thinking about what interests me, and what I’m naturally drawn to as thinking/writing points, I’m finding some surprises along the way. So, I hope you’ll join me on this naked journey and we can awkwardly figure out things like furniture-sitting etiquette together.
