Being Shakespeare

I had an English professor when I was an undergrad who liked to say that Shakespeare should have written less.

Well, let’s think about that a bit. Shakespeare should have written less. Now, I will admit that while I like Shakespeare, I am not a member of the cult of Shakespeare is the greatest genius who ever lived, the greatest writer of the human spirit in the history of the world. Shakespeare was a good writer. He was brilliant some of the time. Many writers are brilliant some of the time. And he also wrote some plays that don’t work for us anymore in the present day and age.

Imagine you are Shakespeare. Imagine trying to figure out which of the plays that you are writing will matter in a hundred years, or a thousand. How likely is it that you’re going to guess right? How likely is it instead, that you’re going to end up, not only guessing wrong, but spending a whole lot more of your time psyching yourself out from writing your best play because you’re too busy wondering if it’s good enough? Isn’t Hamlet the play about spending too much time thinking and not enough time actually doing something?

If you’re a writer and you’re busy worrying about if you’re writing something good enough, can I say that I think you are wasting your energy? Can I tell you honestly that you need to get over yourself? You may be Shakespeare or you may not be Shakespeare. In a hundred years, people may remember you or they may not. So what? That’s not your job. Your job is to write the stuff that only you can write. Figure out what that is, and get to it.

You will make mistakes. You will write books that “you shouldn’t have written” by the judgment of some English professor somewhere. So what? You will have done your work. Maybe that English professor is right and maybe he isn’t, but my point is, you can’t tell if he is or isn’t. And it isn’t your job. You’re the writer, not the critic.

So, write!