If I were Shakespeare...

...I'd be so much better at writing than I actually am.

Having hung around a Creative Writing forum for a couple of years now, I haven't been able to keep myself from making a few observations. Mostly pertaining to defensive pubescent teens, but still, some observations. One of these observations is on a defensive technique that has reoccurred with such regularity as to have become a pair of common logical fallacies of writing I've decided to call:

The Fame Fallacy, and The Cummingsdun'it! Fallacy

Writers guilty of this fallacy tend to make statements such as:

"If Shakespeare wrote this you would've loved it." Or,

"Cummings wrote like this"

What they fail to realize is that cummings did not "get away" with oddly structured work because he was famous, he was famous because his poetry was groundbreaking and not in any way random in its structure. To put it succinctly, Cummings and Shakespeare had skill, and if Shakespeare had written what they themselves had written, he would have written it differently. And not just because Shakespeare was a playwright and a poet rather than a High-Fantasy-Space-Opera-Soap Novelist.

The real issue of the Fame Fallacy is that the writer who fall back on it expects to be given the benefit of the doubt. S/he wrongly assumes that famous writers are given this benefit because of their fame, rather than the skill and talent that brought them their fame.

A common side-track of The Fame Fallacy is The Cummingsdun'it! Fallacy

The problem in this instance is that the writer wrongly assume that if Cummings did it, so can they. The problem, apart from failing to understand or see the system behind unorthodox structure in poetry, or the point behind writing prose in a certain manner, or the fact that some things just require plain skill to pull of, is that they don't understand the historical or social context behind that particular piece of writing.

Writing does not exist in a vacuum, as most crafts, it has developed over time. While certain true masters of the craft (like, you guessed it, Shakespeare) have managed to write things that truly and genuinely still move and engage us centuries after the fact, it does not remove the historical aspect of their work. Shakespeare is not only enjoyable because of his great skill, he is enjoyable as high water-mark of classical sonnets and overall 16th century writing. Trying to duplicate his archaic syntax just because you like your poetry to be flowery is completely missing the point of why it works for him and not for you, just like most fantasy writers who want to be Tolkien manages to miss that the The Lord of The Rings is a by-product of a life-time spent creating an alternate-world Europe, which is what carries the books through in the end.

While there are a few choice exceptions in these Fallacies, such as writing a 16th century styled Sonnet, archaic syntax to boot to better understand such sonnets overall, or to increase your mastery of language, budding writers would do best to let these fallacies go, along with their pride.

Now let's just hope no one wrote this down in better words long before I even thought of it.