Wasting time with style and some period class

Anne loses her family home, and her family moves to a city she hates instead of staying in the familiar countryside like she wanted, but being forced outside her comfort zone is good for her. She's useful to her nephews, she strengthens her friendship with the Musgroves, she makes new friends with the Harvilles and Captain Benwick. It allows Captain Wentworth to come back into her life, and that seems like a bad thing at first, but it allows her to move past the regret of the past and into a new relationship.

Louisa's injury is a terrible turn of events, but it brings Louisa and Benwick together, and allows Anne to show her true worth in a way that makes Wentworth admit his love for her.

Even Anne's great regret, her refusal of Wentworth that led to eight years of misery, turns out to be a good thing. Wentworth's disappointment made him throw himself into his career, and his lack of a wife gave him freedom to go on voyages and into battles without worrying about how it would affect a family that relied on him. Anne's rejection--his first taste of failure--gave him enough maturity to keep the money that he made, and he came home a rich man who could well support a wife. Instead of starting out married life with stress and worry over uncertain funds, they are able to wed as people who are financially stable and secure in their love for each other.

Absolutely. I think every writer hits this Buyer's Remorse-ish thing occasionally, and it's deeply annoying when it happens.

What's worked for me in the past has been (first) to just sit with the issue for a little. Once the realization of something-not-working has turned up, don't get in a fight with it right away! Go forward and do some writing on which you're not having any conflicts. Give the suddenly-annoying thing, or things, a few days or a week to settle down.

Then revisit the troublesome issue and see if it's calmed down at all. If it has, and seems less troublesome now, fine: just go on as you were. This kind of sudden flash of uncertainty or dissatisfaction isn't at all uncommon. They can come and go with great speed.

But it it hasn't calmed down or gone away, and is still kicking up a stink, the best way to get through the difficulty seems to be to make it explain itself.

You do this by putting your Editor Hat on—every writer has one—and writing an editorial-style note to yourself; explaining, in detail, what seems not to be working about the plot point or piece of character business or whatever: and why. Don't be curt or brief with yourself; lay it all out in detail, as if your potential note-reader had no idea at all what was going on. And tell yourself exactly what's bothering you about it. Can't work this issue out immediately? Take a day or so off and do other things, and then come back to it. The ability of the Writer Brain to keep worrying away at stuff in the background while you're doing other things is a never-ending wonder.

My experience with this approach has typically had one of two results. While writing the note (or while considering it, completed, later) I've routinely started seeing ways to fix the thing that seemed wrong. Sometimes the insight has taken a day or two to materialize after writing the note. The plain-language clarification of the details of the issue often seems to help suggest ways around or through them: or to lay increasingly open a sense of what the problem really is, so that a way through it starts becoming clearer.

...At which point you take your own advice: get in under the hood of your plot and start tinkering with the things that you feel you can fix to resolve the problem. (And it's okay to have to flail around a little among the opportunities at this point before finding the fix that works best. Try one and see how it settles in: if it doesn't, pull it out, shove something similar-but-different into the opening and see how that works.)

Or alternately: while writing that note, I've started feeling that the problem in question wasn't actually one that needed to be solved at all—that the original concept was just fine as it was. (This realization has routinely started to betray itself when writing the note about "what's wrong" starts becoming difficult because the reasons I was being bothered by turned out to be just unfocused "plotting anxiety" and weren't really all that problematic to start with.) ...At which point you file your note away (because who knows when you might need it for the resolution of some other problem?) and get on with the work at hand.

I've found this approach pretty useful. In a lot of years of work, I've only ever had to sit down and write a second note about an issue once, and that one cleared things up really conclusively. (It revealed something crucial that I'd been failing to deal with, and eventually required the insertion of a smoked-lamb,-potted-goose-and-white-bean casserole into a key chapter of The Door Into Sunset—a fabulous recipe that turned out to have a lot more in it than fiber. And which I'll post over at the Food and Cooking of the Middle Kingdoms site sometime in the next month or so.)

So I very much recommend this approach. Give it a shot and see how it works for you. Trust yourself.

They’re really not.

Yes. On paper, they couldn’t be more different.

Elizabeth is witty. Jane is reserved. Elizabeth grew up surrounded by family. Jane grew up alone. Elizabeth’s story is bright, social, and full of banter. Jane’s is gothic, lonely, and haunted. But underneath all of that, they’re fighting the exact same battle. Neither of them will let someone else decide what their life should look like.

“I refuse to marry someone I do not love wholeheartedly, and I refuse to do something just because society says so.”

Elizabeth refuses Mr. Collins. Not because he’s poor. Not because he’s cruel. But because marrying someone she doesn’t love would mean giving up the right to choose for herself.

Jane refuses St. John. Not because he isn’t respectable. Not because he isn’t kind. But because she knows marrying him would slowly erase who she is. And I think that’s where the two novels quietly agree.

People tend to describe Elizabeth as someone who marries for love. I don’t think that’s entirely true. She marries for respect. Love follows.

The reason she rejects Darcy the first time isn’t because she doesn’t love him. She doesn’t know him well enough to love him. She rejects him because she believes he lacks the qualities she refuses to compromise on. Only after Darcy changes—and only after Elizabeth realizes she judged him unfairly—can they meet as equals.

Jane follows the same pattern. People love talking about Rochester’s redemption. But I don’t think Jane Eyre is actually Rochester’s story.

It’s Jane’s.

Every major choice she makes is a refusal to lose herself. She leaves Gateshead. She leaves Lowood. She leaves Thornfield. Not because she’s running away. Because she refuses to compromise the one quality that defines her. Throughout the novel, Jane is self-affirming even amid the gravest adversities. That quality is impossible to repress. Even when she loves Rochester, she refuses to become his mistress because she knows that love at the cost of her own principles isn’t really love.

That’s what makes both novels feel surprisingly modern.

Neither heroine allows love to become the loss of self.

And I think that’s why both women are constantly described as “stubborn.” It’s funny how literature has a habit of calling women stubborn whenever they insist on having standards. Elizabeth is criticized for rejecting Mr. Collins and initially refusing Darcy. Jane is told she’s foolish for leaving Rochester and later for refusing St. John.

From everyone else’s perspective, they’re throwing away perfectly good futures. Security. Status. Comfort. From theirs, they’re protecting something far more valuable.

Themselves.

Both novels quietly argue that losing yourself is far more dangerous than losing an opportunity.

Maybe that’s why Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennet have endured for centuries and are still being shown in media today. Not because they found the perfect man. But because people almost always succumb to peer pressure and allow society to reshape their opinions.

They don’t.

Jane never lets anyone else’s expectations define her conscience. Elizabeth never lets anyone else’s expectations define her judgment. They stay strong and keep to what they believe in, through thick and thin, no matter what.

Michael J. Fox + jumping/falling from somewhere in For Love or Money

idk why i did this but

bonus: