A Long Road of Writing

Sometime last week, I found myself browsing the “stories” folder on my laptop. I originally clicked on this folder because I was recently thinking about an old story of mine, and I wanted to re-read it for fun. I couldn’t remember when I last read this short story, but I wrote it back in 2012, so I wanted to see how it has held up since its creation.

But after reading that story, I began locating other older short stories that I had written. Stories that were at least four years old. And as I was reading them, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cringe.

For the most part, the plots for these stories were still pretty solid. My issue was with the writing itself – mainly, the grammar. I was cringing so hard at all the dialogue punctuation errors. And even though I had moments where I wrote specific details about the characters' surroundings, I could definitely do a better job at creating a more vivid scene. Also, some of the stories felt too rushed and could use some slowing down in order to let the story breathe.

Of course, once I finished my trip down memory lane, I had to read a short story that I wrote last fall. Sort of like a palate cleanser. What a difference my writing has become.

Sometimes it’s difficult to see improvements in my writing (or anything in general) when I compare them to more recent works, but seeing how they stack up to a piece from multiple years ago made me feel strangely proud of myself. Like I actually have come a long way, despite feeling like I still have a long road ahead of me.

I still haven’t re-read my Spring Writing Project, though. I wanted to wait a couple of months to let the story rest, so I could read it with fresh eyes. But now I’m starting to realize how seldom I revisit old manuscripts. I think it’s mainly because I’m afraid of how terrible it might actually be written, and I don’t want to believe that I spent all those hours writing it as wasted time. (Even though I’m aware that no time is actually wasted when I’m writing – practicing a skill eventually leads to masterpieces.)

And to think, in two weeks, I’ll be participating in my eighth year of NaNoWriMo. I refuse to look back at any of my NaNo projects from 2011-2014. Just thinking about them and how awful the writing might be makes me cringe.

But despite all of the wincing, I will never remove these documents from my computer files. I remember how hard I worked on them at that time. I never delete a story, just in case I might mine its plot for a completely new (and better written) story for a later time.

More often than not, though, these stories simply make me smile. No matter how old I was, I was still making time to write.