I’ve been sorting through half-finished manuscripts stored on my laptop. And as many of you know, I’ve also been revamping stories whose rights have been returned to me.
These are older stories I wrote 5 or more years ago and revisiting them is teaching me a lot and hopefully making me a better writer too.
I’m learning that your older writing can make you cringe. It can force you to put your hand over your eyes and say did I really write like that and what possessed me to write a scene like that? I should have done this, and I should have done that.
Cringing aside, what it’s showing me is I’ve grown as a writer. I can be self critical. I can strive to do even better.
I can use older writing as an exercise to create stronger more vivid scenes, bring characters to life, and create more authentic sounding dialogue.
I can promise myself that I’ll do better on the next story I write.
So moral of this story, and the purpose of me sharing this with you is to encourage you to check out your older stories and use them as a way to gauge how far you’ve come and how much farther you still have to go to become the best writer you can possibly be.
Try it sometime and I think it will make you a stronger more confident writer.