Did Shakespeare have a certificate?

By the time this blog post, as the original email letter it is drops into my subscribers inboxes I will be on my way up to York for the Jericho Writers’ ‘Festival of Writing’ weekend. It is the first writing festival I have ever been to! It is in fact, to my teenage daughter’s absolute astonishment, the first festival of anything I have attended. I am not the festival-going type (three-day-old portable loos? No thanks), but this one is, of course, something that I am deeply interested in and love to do; writing! (It also has proper mains-drainage loos, I checked).

It feels like a watershed moment – I am excited. I am also scared.

This event is going to be full of highly experienced writers, people who will be extremely interesting and who will, no doubt, have lots of valuable tips and pointers which I will be able to incorporate into my habits and improve my writing craft (because I want to be the best writer what I can [sic]). Maybe, it will also be an opportunity to find a few more ‘writerly’ friends with whom I can share worries about sentence structure, plot pacing and character flaws.

That all sounds brilliant. But what if, in comparison to these publishing/authorly stars, I am thought to be unbelievably dull and old-fashioned? What if this event is subtly but wholly imbued with the doctrine that to be a ‘proper’ or ‘real’ writer one should really have bothered to obtain a certificate to prove that fact. Because horrors; I don’t have a certificate! In fact, I have very few certificates to my name, and it is, at times like these, when I am due to mix with ‘subject matter experts’, that my inferiority complex pops up and I get to wondering if I was wrong not to.

When I am not so worried about the mediocrity of my talent, I am firmer in my belief that certificates of most sorts aren’t the be-all-and-end-all of living a successful life successfully.  

I have held this belief for most of my adult life. It is why I got myself a job after doing A-Levels, rather than go to university. In truth, I only stayed on for A-Levels because I was, at sixteen, too young to face the adult world of work. I needed those two extra years to grow-up a bit more. It is why I resisted all the ‘you should get an MBA’ influences that exist when one works in the tech/business consultancy roles, as I once did. Instead, I busied myself with the practise of practical business management and real-world systems implementation.

But this isn’t true for everyone. It is my own particular hoist for my own particular petard. And, clearly, I am not impervious to formal-education’s marketing – particularly as I attempt to attract a literary agent and traditional publisher. Because many of these individual’s will begin conversations by casually dropping in their first in an MA Creative Writing degree from Oxbridge. To be honest, I would do exactly that too if I have done that course and got that result! But I hear this and the inferiority complex voice inside goes, ‘There you are! I told you! That’s what it takes to be taken seriously in publishing, you shouldn’t have started from where you did, you should have started over there instead’. If I give this hopeless voice any power, it will definitely stop me doing what I want. It will make me think it is mandatory to have a qualification before I am allowed to put any more pens to paper!

Such a certificate may, for some, be the salve needed to shut the critical inferiority-complex voices up, at least a little. They are a tangible proof point that they deserve to be doing what they’re doing, permission to be allowed to. See; that right there - that’s when I get uneasy about the whole ‘formal education certification is best’ message.

My wise and lovely husband has a theory, regularly spoken of in our household, which is that everything worthwhile in life does *not* require a certificate. How to be a good person, for instance. How to love, and be loved, well – surely one of the greatest skillsets for a happy and fulfilling life – is something society does not educate any of us in, not in any formal sense at least.

When I feel overwhelmed and worried about how good my writing skills are or have my confidence abashed by the latest thing, my husband waits for me to get all the ‘maybe I should…’ mitherings said aloud, before he asks, “Did Shakespeare have a certificate in creative writing?”

It's a little glib, it could be accused of being a little simplistic, maybe. But I hear the truth in this question of his. Do you?

Because another personal truth worthy of acknowledgement is that I have learnt a tremendous amount of what to do, how to do it, when to start, when to finish, by just getting on and doing the actual thing itself. Yes, this means I do this publicly, my mistakes are visible. My first novel is out there and, in comparison to my eventual 100th novel should I live long enough to rack up that many stories, its inherent flaws, due to my ‘beginner’ status, will be painfully visible. But this is not necessarily a terrible thing, certainly not one I feel I ‘should’ be embarrassed about.

Maybe a bunch of people at this writers’ festival will indeed think me naïve and beyond-the-pale because of my uneducated, uncertificated skills. Equally though, I hope there will be many who celebrate the ‘can-do, will-do’ ethic I try to embody.

To which I draw my hypothesis thus – certificates and theory-test-results are useful tools and all part of the great mix of getting stuff in the world done, but they are by no means essential. I posset a great deal more may be learnt by performing the behaviour and living the actual experience itself. All the knowledge, all the skill and technique, all the heart and soul of my writing craft – it is all there inside me already. This is true for you and your talents too. Perhaps you need a course to find them, or to accelerate their uncovering, or perhaps, like me, you just need to get busy digging!

 Rachel x