If you follow my blog regularly, you may already know that Cervantes inspired me to enter a doctoral program in Early Modern Spanish Lit.

One of the things I find so fascinating about Cervantes is the situation he lived in, along with the fact that he always considered himself a failure.

You see, Cervantes died on the same day as Shakespeare, and in Cervantes’ time, Spain had a theater to rival that of Elizabethan England (though few people who don’t speak Spanish would likely be aware of that today).

Cervantes was always poor. Theater was where the money was, and he wasn’t a great playwright. (The greatest Spanish playwrights of his day were Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca. Cervantes and Lope famously did not get along).

Poetry was where the prestige was. Cervantes was a mediocre poet at best.

What did Cervantes have? Short stories and a funny book about an old man trying to be a knight–basically the Monty Python of his era.

No prestige in that at all.

Today, Cervantes is the only writer from Early Modern Spain known throughout the entire world. Even in English, you can find “quixotic” in the dictionary. Cervantes is widely considered among literary scholars to have written the first modern novel.

While the chances are small any of us who read this will have that kind of impact, the fact is, we don’t know what our impact will be on those who read our fiction.

We might become someone’s favorite writer, might write the book they take the heart and never let go of because it gave them hope or taught them something they needed to know, or gave them something they desperately needed.

So don’t give up! You don’t know what you impact are having, let alone what impact you might have in the future.