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how did the greatest writer who ever lived get good

and what are the longest-lived stories about?

By Cellestine AggreyPublished 3 years ago 7 min read
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how did the greatest writer who ever lived get good
Photo by Hannah Olinger on Unsplash

If you're anything like me, you read and write things that won't last hundreds of years. Why?

Talent? No. This is not a spiel about talent. This is a spiel about leveling up on your writing and how it's relevant today. That's my passion and in a perfect world, I wish I could build a course to help folks improve on their writing. Something low on technical jargon but almost guarantees a fresh perspective and quick progress on technical skills.

For example

I'm willing to bet you spent a lot of time in school studying this dood called Bill and his impenetrable style. The subtext with all the greats being "you could never be this good", or "you like sex and violence? How about this high-brow crazy has-been, who's always been around because we haven't had time to replace him, but if you can say the weird words, then here's some sanctioned kissing, stabbing, and poison-drinking to fill our syllabus for a few months."

The other subtext of course being "If you don't understand, it's your fault. Just uncross your eyes and read again."

Here's the kicker: Once in a while, just once in a long, long while old billy-boy comes alive and makes it all worth it. Too few of us think to ask what steps he took and how long it took him to get that good. Fewer still ever think "I'll probably still be writing in ten years, how much better could I get if I worked at it daily?"

Right now, there are people out there amusing their best friends, having brilliant arguments, trying to impress their crush, or being subtly mean to said crush in ways they don't yet understand (just like billy-boy did with his most famous poem for example), but they didn't write it all down. You're probably one of them!

You know you've had cathartic conversations that would've been iconic on a stage. We all have for better or worse at home, at work, or in therapy. This dood just wrote it all down.

Take the 138th thing he wrote for example

There's dramatic irony in every line. One could achieve this in less than a hundred bits of writing. Once learned, it's a powerful skill that you'd have for life.

I went to Stratford-upon-Avon and saw how poor he lived. It looked almost exactly like my grandparent's house back home! That was a shock. A mud hut, no electricity, dark wooden windows, and a big contrast to the plush living the higher classes enjoyed in his time.

It's clear that when he was young he decided that he wanted to change his circumstances. It's clear that he asked himself what issues we would never stop talking or thinking about. You can see in his writing that he worked on this issue from many different angles.

He never openly asked the question "What is the maximum amount of meaning I can wedge into a paragraph, a sentence, a word?" but you can see that he thought about it, you know? He probably didn't talk in iambic pentameter at the market but he probably did annoy a good few folks with it because people don't change. Not everyone would have liked it.

My guess is that this is how he started. Everything else came after. He simply attacked a few core issues like his life depended on it.

The stupidest thing I ever said was "I want to be like Shakespeare." That phrase is like a bad smell at a dinner party. It makes people think you're strange. I don't know why I said it, I haven't even read him much but the little I've read is conclusive. He IS the greatest writer that ever lived and here's why:

There's something about the Sonnet.

Old billy boy discovered it early and used the following strengths to become a creative force the likes of which would go unmatched for centuries:

1 his fantastic memory

2 whoever taught him

3 just a few literary devices (similie, metaphor, heroic verse, and dramatic irony)

4 the haters who tried to put him down and

5 his patrons

Now there are plenty of people out there with good memories. If that's not you then there's plenty of videos and literature on how to get one. The main thing is that this dood was crazy enough to embrace the ambition that he could be the greatest writer since Enheduanna and order his life to achieve it. The other thing that helped him was the fact that he was writing throughout a pandemic. This helped his art because people needed to be distracted and he was in a position to be the Netflix, Youtube, and Tik-Tok of his time.

Besides being able to work out how to be brilliant, the timing was a huge reason why he got big. Those who have good time management probably take it for granted.

BACK TO HOW THOUGH

The first writing course I'd create if I could, would be called The Anatomy of The Sonnet. I would trace its beginnings from its real inventor (Giacomo da Lentini) to Petrarch almost a century later and on. This form has remained unchanged for over seven hundred and fifty years because it helps. Every major poet has futzed with it at some point beacuse it helps. In my course, I intend to show how. For example:

1 A sonnet is the perfect length to capture a story's four main parts (beginning, middle, end, and punchline)

2 Its brevity makes it easier to stick in your mind but a competent user can make delicious any size of Story through this medium.

3 It's also the perfect vehicle for developing a literary device. There aren't that many great sonnets. I plan to include fourteen examples spanning across time from both male and female writers.

4 No matter what kind of writing you want to do, the ability to make every line its own event, to fit a whole world in a sentence. This is why nearly every major poet has messed with sonnets at some point. It's why they got good.

Think about it:

How much time would it take to write a hundred and fifty-four full-length stories?

1 Due to the size of larger stories it would be harder to track the way devices intertwine

2 It would also be harder to see the bits where you fall flat and therefore to self-correct.

3 If you can create big story-scapes in just a few lines (Ozymandias style) imagine what you could do with blogs, bylines, jokes, sets, adverts and big ol' screen plays!

This is how the greats should be taught:

1 Learn what they did

2 Why they did it,

3 How they did it

4 Try to do it yourself.

WHERE YOU COME IN

My little hobby here makes so much sense to me and I think this kind of project could help whole generations of young writers out there yet sometimes when I talk about it I feel like I've marked myself out as a crazy person by declaring that I'm... Tony Stark.

Getting a holiday from paying my bills could allow me to setup this course and maybe even complete a few books I've been working on these last few years.

So what is it about me that made me come up with this idea I hear you ask?

The best way I can put it is this: You know what it's like to be shy right? You know what it's like to be scared of failure, I know you do!

Well, in much the same way, you can be terrified of success. I am all these things.

If you don't know the protocol (for happiness!), if you don't own those black-tie suits or know the world you're looking toward, it can be intimidating and feel unsafe. So I picked an impossible goal. It allows me to move at least, to create some writing that I love, and develop a way to practice that lets me see the next step, the next year of writing. It's all about the journey anyhow and if you're anything like me, just take baby steps. We're a long time lived. You'll make it.

inspirational
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About the Creator

Cellestine Aggrey

I want to know what it took the best writers to get good. I'm curious. The minute Shakespeare, WC Williams, T Hughes, CA Duffy had done their best work must have felt like sky diving. We all should know what that deep catharsis feels like.

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