Then and Now - Some Writerly Rambles

[kriadydragon]

Of course it's always interesting to go back, look at your earlier works and figure out if you've progressed - or better yet, realize you've progressed. My mom found some of my earlier novels written back in my early twenties. Just picking out paragraphs and reading them, I have to admit that - structure wise (sentences, spelling, grammar, etc) - my stories weren't as bad as I thought they would be. I'm sure that were I to clean them up they might make fairly decent young adult novels (and they would have to be YA novels or aimed at a younger audience. I have the characters walking on soft, fluffy clouds, literally, for crying out loud, because the world is that kind of ridiculously magical). But it's still the flowery language of a young writer who thought that by emulating Tolkein as much as possible it would make their stories the best thing since Lord of the Rings.

Which, obviously, in hindsight, is completely ridiculous, but it's also all part of the learning process, so it's not something I look back on and groan about in embarrassment. I might laugh, but never groan, even when I read over those early attempts. Especially since those early attempts are gold compared to my even earlier, teen-years attempts, when nothing got finished and if it did get finished it was only fifty pages long if that.

I think one of the ways that you know you are progressing (other than the gradual erosion of your ego until you feel balanced on the head of a pin between hope that your writing is at least descent, and despair that it probably isn't) is when you find yourself emerging from the desire to be "the next *insert famous author here*" and immersing yourself in being your own author. I'm not speaking for everyone, but speaking for myself I was one of those writers who really did want to be the next Tolkein - that is, Tolkein for the YA world. Now I'm just a writer with a lot of stories I want to tell, and no care about how well they're received or how popular they become. As long as someone is enjoying them, then I'm happy.

Although, yes, a little popularity would be awesome. One of my books made into a movie? That would be mind-boggling wonderful, but then so would some random artist doing a series of pictures based on one of my books.

Comments

[kriadydragon.livejournal.com]

I think "getting it (the good, the bad, and the just plain ugly XD) out of your system" is just a large part of growing up as a writer.

Very true. I think every author has that "must get out of system!" story. I do know there are those authors who only ever had one story to tell, and wrote nothing else once they told it.

I used to feel guilty about devoting so much time to fanfic and practically no time to original fic. Right up until I realized that I was in dire need of improvement. I'm terrible at whipping up original short stories, which is how most authors get their practice in, so wasn't writing as much as I needed to in order to improve. Then came fanfiction and I was writing like crazy. Now I look back on finding fanfic with nothing but gratitude. (However, I should confess that I do kind of, sort of regret the reading aspect of fanfic. Not majorly or anything since there's so much great stuff to read, but there are quite a few stories that I regret running into - some my fault, some that came at me out of the blue, but that squicked me in ways that took me forever to get over).