What Tragedy means

A tragedy isn’t what happens, but is, in fact, the path that was available but realized too late. It questions the reader about what happened. It tells a story that had other paths than the one that was taken. The people who think the tragedy in Romeo and Juliet is the ending are wrong. The tragedy is how Shakespeare portrayed the story and mocked them. They were children who got everything they wanted, and then, when they were faced with a forced marriage but met one another, that was when they couldn’t get what they wanted. Shakespeare used this to mock them. That is the tragedy: they had the path of accepting the forced marriage, but they were too spoiled to take that path, therefore leading to their deaths. Their deaths aren’t the tragedy, but the path that was opened and avoided.

Most writers and readers don’t understand the questions of identity and tragedy. Take, for example, a gentle person who allows pain in his heart to take him over. He finds a person who makes him human, but is blinded by bloodthirst and kills her. He then realizes he has become the monster he feared and eventually commits suicide. The tragedy isn’t the death; it is the realization of what he became. He destroyed the one thing that made him human. That is a tragedy.

The reason why Shakespeare is a legend is because he applied his understanding of emotions and tragedies to his works. He turns his characters into monsters, then has them realize what they did and recognize the other path that is now long gone. He makes them regret their choices. That knowledge he had of his work takes most writers a very long time to explore through identity, emotions, and tragedy. Shakespeare’s works are legendary because of the self-questioning that makes his characters realize the existence of that untaken path. The path that was taken turns the characters into the tragedies, not merely the events.

There is a goal for some writers to rival Shakespeare, like myself, but most of them want to become the second Shakespeare. What few of them want is to become the first of their own name. For me, that name is Slade. To achieve that, they need not only talent but also tons of work toward that goal. In order to achieve it, they must understand what Shakespeare understood and apply it to their own work. Readers must think, "I haven't read something like this before," rather than, "I feel like I've read this type of writing before." That is what it means to be a true writer. If readers don't feel that, it means you are doing something wrong.