Got a bit of those winter blahs, so here's a little something from last summer.
Back in the day I used to participate in a monthly writing related blog hop sponsored by the Insecure Writers Support Group, a writing community that supports new and established writers. They have their own blog and have a killer newsletter that is jam packed with all kinds of writing related info, both of which I highly recommend.
In the newsletter, they always offer a question that you can answer during the monthly blog hop (which is always the first Wednesday of the month). I thought that this month's question was so up my alley that I decided to give it a whirl for my weekly blog post.
"Have I ever re-read any of my early writing, and what was that experience like?"
The short answer is: I have and to quote an old song, "oh boy!"
The long answer, which is this post is: It has definitely been an eye opener. When I re-read the stuff that I wrote early on and compare it to what/how I write now, I cringe so hard that I sometimes pull a facial muscle.
While a lot of it has been all kinds of level of cringe, a good chunk of it has been salvageable to the point where I've been able to successfully rewrite and either publish/re-publish or have it soon to be published.
A few examples spring to mind:
1} Both of my recent novellas, The Mortality of Familial Love & To Live Is To Die Young, are re-imagined versions of previously poorly written stories of the kind that would forever languish in a slushy pile never to see the light of day.
2} My current fantasy series was re-imagined from the ashes of a (very) badly written novella that went nowhere fast over a dozen years ago until I changed the way I write my stories and decided to revisit that cringey story.
3} I have a novella that I plan on republishing this year, because the original version that was published over a decade ago was not up to my current standards as a writer. I realize it shouldn't have been and I'm now trying to rectify that. I've already did this with a previous short story collection, because the mid-2020's me absolutely hated the late 2000's version me.
4} And finally, I was able to successfully re-write nearly a dozen short stories because again, this version of me was severely disappointed with that version of me's mediocre writing (and it was).
So yes, I have spent the past half dozen years pulling all kinds of Calvin & Hobbes faces when reading all of my early writing, but during those same half dozen years, I've also been channeling my inner Calvin & Hobbes can-do attitude when it comes to re-imagining those admittedly bad stories into something 20x better.
I think perseverance is a must have quality for a writer, especially when you're able to find a few good pebbles in the proverbial sandbox of badly written stories, no matter how old those stories happen to be.
Life as a writer is often good, but it's better when you can resurrect an early badly written story into something that you can be proud of.
My first novel was a complete rewrite from a partial story I wrote almost thirty years earlier. It was beyond cringe-worthy.
ReplyDeleteA lot of my stuff was super cringe. My saving grace was that each one contained just enough of a nugget to rebuild with.
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