Today in class we learned about Sir Walter Scott, and now I'm sitting here dumbfounded wondering why I have never learned about this man before.
He was the most popular and most prolific writer perhaps...ever. More so than JK Rowling, if you can even imagine that. He was witty and hilarious and built a manor and an estate that was based on different pieces of his novels, and he wrote himself out of debt when he spent way too much money making that estate perfect because everything he wrote was just THAT popular, even after he died. He was just basically the most influential and important person ever (according to my professor and, after hearing all of this, also kind of according to me). (I will let you know if this changes for better or for worse.) (The gist of this is that you should look him up and learn about him and then read his stuff because he. is. incredible.) But there was one aspect about Sir Scott's life and work that I found very intriguing on a number of different levels. And that aspect is this:
When he started writing novels, he wrote them anonymously (even though most people eventually knew it was him). He already was a very well known and revered poet when he decided to try his hand at novel writing, so he wanted people to read these novels without their knowledge of his previous works affecting their experience, and also, and perhaps more importantly, because the novel at the time was considered a very low form of writing. It was associated with the popular, the mundane, the feminine. People didn't really take novels seriously, and he wanted to have a chance at making one without his reputation being lessened. (I'm sure there were a lot of other reasons behind it, too.) But he didn't have to worry about that for long because his very first novel, Waverly, was such a sensation that he went on to write about 40 more novels in his lifetime--successfully helping the novel become something more respected and widely-read (even by men of all people). The novel as we know it today owes a lot to him for making it what it is.
I think, in a way, the same thing can be applied to blogs today. They aren't really taken seriously, they're popular, seemingly all the same, and associated with women--usually the more domestic-recipe-sharing-craft-tutorial-making women. And people look down on blogs because of that. I'm not saying that someone's going to come in and make blogging this amazingly popular and respected thing and change the way everyone thinks of blogs thirty years down the line, but it's an interesting thing to think about. With the way that newspapers and magazines and physical, tangible forms of writing are disappearing right now, who knows what the future of publishing and the spreading of ideas and writing will be like.
But the thing that I really resonate with is his use of anonymity. If you haven't noticed, I like being relatively anonymous around here. And not really because I feel embarrassed about the form of the blog itself--since mine isn't typical in that sense in the slightest--but just because I can. In this social-media dominated world, everyone is made to feel like they have to give out all of their information and a bunch of pictures of themselves and their lives on any platform they inhabit. I can jump on almost any public Instagram account and find out people's anniversary dates, the names of their children, what their children look like, and even find out where they LIVE. It's creepy! And it doesn't have to be that way. You can have a weird little blog where the only pictures of yourself are in doodle form and you don't have a whole page dedicated to all of your wedding pictures and really personal information about yourself (if you want). I rather enjoy it. And not because I want to hide behind the anonymity because I'm scared of people reading my opinions or disagreeing with me, or because this is the only way that I feel free enough to share my thoughts with people. That's not it at all. I just enjoy sharing more personal things in more personal ways. With people I meet. Friends. Family. Face to face.
So yeah. Walter Scott. I like the guy.
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