Running up that hill

[pjthompson]

It’s both disturbing and gratifying to read old stories I haven’t touched in a few years. Gratifying because I can see the progress I’ve made as a writer; disturbing because I realize that stories I think are pretty danged good at this moment in time will probably make me cringe at some future reading. Not all of the old stories make me cringe, fortunately, but sometimes, as now when I am rereading a novella from some years ago, I wonder what kind of line of self-delusion I might be walking. Reading this poor old thing just makes me so tired, so much so that I wrote this blog post during my writing time rather than continue reading it. Back in the day, I thought it one of the best things I’d written. It even got some recognition as an Editor’s Choice on the Online Writing Workshop. And maybe it was the best story I’d written at that point in time.

The other cringe-making thing is that I reworked this novella so many times I edited some of the life out of it. Now that I’m incorporating it into my WIP, I’ve gone back to an older version to compare/contrast. Some of what I cut out to streamline can probably be added back into the novel with no harm, reincorporating some of the richness that got rinsed away.

Or I may wind up cutting it out all over again.

That’s the thing about writing. One has to stay true to the current moment: pushing and expanding outside the comfort zone, climbing the next hill, and the next. I have to keep learning my craft, not resting on what I learned last year or the year before. It’s a constant climb up the rock face, scrabbling for finger and toe holds. Sometimes when one reaches a plateau, one can take a break, but there will always be another rock face. I can’t worry that some future plateau will show me what a hash I made of the last plateau and the stories it contained. I have to stay true to where I am now, either climbing or resting, and realize I’m doing the best I can now with the tools I have provided myself. And the tools that each day of writing helps me develop.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Comments

[darkspires.livejournal.com]

I have a file of the very first draft of an old book on my pc. It reads like a travelogue because it basically was one. Take a character and move them from a to b for a reason I then flail around wildly trying to make up. I read that as a humility lesson if ever I think I might have written something good.

It isn't the worst thing I ever wrote. That would be my first book than no one has ever seen, or will ever see. In that, I blithely went forward to commit sins no man had before. It is trunked under my bed in paper form. I don't intend to do anything else with it except maybe give it a decent burial one day. There is nothing in that book a person could salvage. Not a character, a concept, a setting ... nothing.

[pjthompson.livejournal.com]

I think manuscripts like that are the Universe's way of letting us know how much we've progressed, even when sometimes it seems as if we haven't.

[asatomuraki.livejournal.com]

If I still possess the first thing I ever wrote and was pleased with (a rhyming ballad/epic poem I wrote when I was 14) I hope I find it before I die so I can burn it.

Looking through my old stuff makes me kind of happy. It's usually not as bad as I thought at the time, or else it is clear evidence that I've gotten better. I just remind myself of the truism that in fiction, one never arrives. If you think you have, you're doing it wrong.

[pjthompson.livejournal.com]

Truly, one never does arrive. We keep inching forward.

[marycatelli]

It lasts forever, because the skill required to recognize bad writing goes, if not hand-in-hand, at least in strong correlation with the ability to write well.

[pjthompson.livejournal.com]

I wish that were always the case. But time is definitely the best judge of bad writing. :-)

[geniusofevil.livejournal.com]

word.

[pjthompson.livejournal.com]

Several words, in fact.

[kmkibble75.livejournal.com]

Things we write are like people we date -- we may love them at the time, but odds are we'll look back and wonder what the hell we were thinking. It's just the way it goes.

[pjthompson.livejournal.com]

Yep, that hindsight thing has perfect vision. :-D