You can take the girl out of the classroom, but you can’t take the classroom out of the girl. Despite my best efforts, I’m still prone to spontaneous lectures on the material I spent fifteen years teaching. Last night, over a friendly beer at Book Club, someone got me going on that favorite old conspiracy theory: if Shakespeare even really existed. Like most conspiracies, there’s just about no dissension among the ranks of qualified experts that Shakespeare was who we think he was.
The thing is, I think that particular story is compelling because he was so prolific (and because we like the idea of a noble being secretly on our side, however those lines are drawn). We certainly have modern examples of writers generating as much content, but they’re pretty uncommon–and it’s even more uncommon that they are actually a single writer working without a support team of editors or even ghostwriters.
Shakespeare, while well established as a singular dude from Stratford, didn’t produce all that material on his own. Early Modern or Renaissance writing was often and openly a collaborative process, especially given the newly commercial necessity to provide regular updates for patrons and theater-goers. It was not uncommon to find The Boys hanging out at the pub hashing through their ideas and helping each other improve their drafts and fill gaps in the action. (Side note: that scene in Shakespeare in Love is my favorite.) Shax and Marlowe and Jonson all acted and wrote for each other, even as they primarily worked with well known source material.
Shakespeare was Shakespeare, but he wasn’t Shakespeare Alone. Some of the consistently most popular and effective English-language writing was produced by a team leader, not the well-funded but consumptive shut-in that became the standard model in later centuries. In a modern writing culture that emphasizes the solitary greatness of inspired intellectual property as an ultimate goal, it can be hard to operate as though we’re not solely responsible for the success of our words.
But most (and especially business) writing isn’t really focused on the goal of creating one-of-a-kind art. Even if it is, a lot of the most successful artists aren’t actually writing alone: Taylor Swift, for example, writes with a clearly-credited team. You don’t have to write alone. You alone are much less likely to produce effective, clear prose than a team dedicated to that purpose. You alone are much less likely to catch even simple errors than you-as-part-of-a-team. It’s not shameful or unethical or even unusual to write together: if Shakespeare and Swift are both frontmen for a creative machine, there’s strong precedent for the model’s success. Get out there and start forming your support squad, and you’ll see better outcomes from your writing with a lot less of your own sweat and tears in the mix.
Something Polished 