On re-learning to write

I haven't made a New Year's resolution in a long time. Several years ago, in an attempt to prove--if to no one but myself--that I actually am in control of my life, I haphazardly resolved to floss more regularly. That happened to be the year I got my first cavity. So we can all conclude how successful I was in keeping that promise to myself. This blog was born out of a New Year's resolution to keep my writing skills from falling into disuse following the completion of my MA. It wasn't made until the New Year in question was already a week old.

I feel as though this project was doomed to fail right from its tardy beginnings.

Now that I've lent myself to the powerful first impression that I am an apathetic procrastinator with questionable oral health, let me assure you that neither of these characteristics could be further from the truth. My dentist regularly compliments my teeth. More pertinently, I've seriously thought about starting a blog for months, but have always let my own fears of inadequacy keep me from writing that fateful first entry. "Is my writing entertaining?" I wondered. "Will people actually read this stuff?" I mused. Do I have enough original thoughts to sustain a blog past its initial honeymoon phase?

It's probably for similar reasons that I haven't kept a personal journal since I started university. For the last seven years, I've made a career (and I really do think that a committed student, unpaid and downtrodden though she may be, can consider academia her "career") out of writing, but, ironically, my graduate degree has, in many ways, made me a less assured writer. Sure, I produced a thesis. Sure, I've gotten my material published. Sure, I could write you an essay examining Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection vis-à-vis sexually monstrous male characters in Gothic literature. (To my eternal credit, I actually did write this essay. It will provide proof of my youthful sapience when I am old, senile, and drooling on myself in some nursing home.) But the idea of sitting down to write with absolutely nothing but my own musings to guide me is a new and scary undertaking. I think this is mostly because my degrees taught me to be so hard on myself as a writer. For me, writing has, for a long time, been something to be scrutinized, challenged, and ultimately rewritten. Moreover, it was something that was so often completed with some ulterior motive in mind: to impress a particularly formidable prof; to satisfy a degree requirement; to earn that all-important scholarship. Writing for writing's sake has become a foreign concept to me.

I've found myself in a strange and distant land.

So if you've made it this far, congratulations: you're now part of a moment in history. I have no idea what is going to fill these metaphorical pages, but thus begins my pitiful attempt to stake out what my beloved Miss Austen would term my own "little bit...of ivory."¹ May it make you think and chuckle, and may it always be grammatically pristine.

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1 I'd like to think Jane Austen and I were BFFLs in a past life. She is the focus of much of my scholarly work; without her, my blog would be titleless; and I can't imagine that I won't write a blog entry about her in the future. In an 1816 letter to her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, she compares the limitations of her authorial scope to the vastness of his:

By the bye, my dear E., I am quite concerned for the loss your mother mentions in her letter. Two chapters and a half to be missing is monstrous! It is well that I have not been at Steventon lately, and therefore cannot be suspected of purloining them: two strong twigs and a half towards a nest of my own would have been something. I do not think, however, that any theft of that sort would be really very useful to me. What should I do with your strong, manly, vigorous sketches, full of variety and glow? How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour?

The "little bit...of ivory" refers to the literal ivory pages of the diary on which she wrote. Imagine penning one of the greatest English novels in a Moleskine notebook. Now imagine penning one of the greatest English novels in one of these bad boys:

(Source)

Ivory notebooks were a more convenient medium than ink and paper, because the writer could jot his or her notes in pencil and then easily erase them. Of course, one can also read a lot into the implied feminine frivolity and impermanence Austen associates with her own writing in comparison to her nephew's "manly…variety and glow." But that’s a different blog entry for a different day.^↩