Writing Begins with Seeing

Lessons from Shakespeare, Part 1

There is a blank page or screen and pressure to produce. An idea waits to be turned into something clear, helpful, and worth reading.

I think that is a false starting point. And I think Shakespeare would agree.

For the next four weeks, I want to learn from William Shakespeare. He never wrote a book about writing, but he left clues throughout his plays about how the creative spark actually works.

The first comes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Near the end of the play, after a long night of confusion and enchantment, the lovers return to daylight and try to explain what happened. Theseus, the ruler of Athens, listens and dismisses their story as imagination.

In doing so, he says this:

“The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.”

Wait, huh?

Theseus means this as a critique. Lovers, madmen, and poets, he says, see things that are not really there.

But Shakespeare is doing something else.

In a few lines, he describes the entire creative process. Not just for poetry, but for writing of any kind.

Writing does not begin with ideas that need polishing. It begins with seeing.

With noticing something real but unformed, and giving it language solid enough to be shared.

That is the clue.

If you want to write, you need something to write about.

And for that you need to see.

And to see, you need to look.

90% of what we do is looking. Paying attention. Making notes. Cross pollinating ideas. Reading widely. Trying new things. Looking for axioms and first principles and then connecting them on paper for the rest of us.

It’s not “airy nothing” unless you choose not to see it and write it.

Happy looking!

And a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to anyone who is reading this today. Would love to hear back from you in the comments. Wish me a Merry Christmas and I promise to have one.

Blessings,

Jeff

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