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Welcome
to the first Wednesday of the month. You know what that means! It's
time to let our insecurities hang out. Yep, it's the Insecure Writer's Support Group blog hop.
If you're a writer at any stage of career, I highly recommend this blog
hop as a way to connect with other writers for support, sympathy,
ideas, and networking. If you're a reader, it's a great way to peek
behind the curtain of a writing life.
Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG. The awesome co-hosts for the February 4 posting of the IWSG are J Lenni Dorner, Victoria Marie Lees, and Sandra Cox!
February 4 question - Many writers have written about the experience of rereading their work years later. Have you reread any of your early works? What was that experience like for you?
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I didn't really start taking my writing life seriously, finishing things, and seeing them into publication until I was in my 40s…so "early works" in that sense is really only a decade or so ago, and while I have grown as a person and a writer in those ten years, it's not startling in the way it might be if I'd been at this longer.
I *did* write when I was child and young woman: poetry, essays, short stories. Mostly, when I look back at those, I'm kind of charmed at my child/younger self. Sometimes, it makes me cringe a little to see how directly autobiographical I was…but capturing your own lived experiences and considering what they might mean isn't such a bad place to start in a life of making art.
Young Samantha and her scribblings led to the Samantha I am now, after all, and I like me and the work I do now, so I can't be too hard on her. :-)
Somewhere along the line, I learned to be a little less "on the nose" but I do still process all the things that worry, bother, or anger me in my writing. And it still works for me.
It's great that you can see how your writing as little Samantha has helped you become the writer you are now. It's such a good way to look at your earlier writing attempts.
ReplyDeleteThanks. I try not to give in to regret or self-recrimination for past decisions. It's not like I can do anything about them now.
DeleteThat's been my writing journey as well.
ReplyDeleteI knew there was a reason I like you.
DeleteI can see that! I revised a work from 2003 a couple years ago and it was QUITE the endeavor. All good, but definitely transformative. It's amazing how life experience changes our perspective on our writing, eh?
ReplyDeleteYeah. I've got a trunk novel that, should I ever decide to pursue it, would be a slog to bring up to the standard I hold myself to now.
DeleteI have some truly terrible stuff I wrote when I was younger—my teen years were especially emo—and it's pretty funny/cringeworthy to look at it now, but it's all good. Part of the process.
ReplyDeleteExactly. Those are the years for overdramatic nonsense.
DeleteI'm glad you can read your early stuff and enjoy it.
ReplyDeleteSometimes I get stuck thinking about all the dumb stuff when I was young, but when I read some things I wrote I realize it was not all bad.
Same. There's bound to be some stupidity on the way to wisdom, right?
DeleteWell, you kind of have to write badly before you can write well. Writing "on the nose" to figure out how to be more subtle is a process, I imagine. There's a cartoon where it says you have to start, and then you have to be bad before you can be good. I agree. So, good job getting to where you are now.
ReplyDeleteThank you. A lot of us expect perfection immediately in our writing lives, and that's not reasonable. Learning takes practice and time.
DeleteI remember writing an autobiography in sixth grade, and someone telling me that I wrote just like I talked. I think it was a compliment, but oh, I didn't take it that way at the time. I didn't keep many of my kid and teen attempts at writing. And most of them would be very cringe. But my later work from my late 20s are not so bad.
ReplyDeleteI could see how that wouldn't feel like a compliment, especially if that's not what you were trying to do!
Delete