Tag: old projects

What I’ve Learned: Typing up Old Works

I am fortunate enough as a writer that I started writing my stories with paper and pen. This is also unfortuate, because a lot of my works from my formative years in the early 2000’s (excuse me as I age myself) are all in a storage bin somewhere. Because of this, I still can’t find the original first novel I wrote and finished at 14. I’m hoping it’s somewhere in storage, somewhere safe, but we shall see.

I should say all the works were in storage or in a bin somewhere. Over the last few months I have scanned them in for safekeeping. A lot of those ideas are still good, or didn’t get the time they deserved back then because I got bored and started something else. Well, now they’re getting the time they deserve.

As of this month, I’ve begun to type up the works in an attempt to return to them later and either finish or repurpose them.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far in the first few weeks.

I’ve advanced a lot in the last decade of writing

I am so thankful for this! This year marks 20 years of writing (and more than half my life). The first few attempts were quite rough, with a lot of over explaining, a lot of characters staring at each other and long paragraphs of purple prose. I’m not perfect in my writing now, but I am glad I’ve made strides to correct some of my previous mistakes and improve upon my craft.

Some of the names are so cringe

While I don’t have the original of the first novel I ever wrote, I remember the names were so cringe. I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to name my main character, so her name kept changing the more people she interacted with. Historical fiction with names like AnnaLiegh and a multitude of other terrible spellings of “old fashioned sounding” names.

In a piece I wrote around 2007/2008, the names aren’t terrible, but spelled so bad. Caylob (who while typing up I kept typing as Cayblob) and Fevar and Braxley. This novel, in my prime teenage years was a great example of why I should not have been naming real life people back then or even thinking about having any kind of responsibility for naming anything, even a puppet or two.

The ideas are spectacular, the execution not so much

When I was a teenager, I had a lot of great ideas, but not a lot of idea how to finish them. A lot of my projects had really strong beginnings, even if the word structure of the sentences were a little cringe. I typed up a chapter of a work recently and my goodness there was so much staring, no page breaks, and each movement was described in too much detail. “Her eyes watched his eyes as she blinked and smiled” kind of thing. So much cringe, but at least now that I’m putting it into a digital form, that means I can edit it all later and avoid the awkward of both characters staring at each other for long periods of time.

There has been so much creativity living in these forgotten pages and I am so excited to explore a few of those old ideas, finish them, and see what happens next now that I have grown as a writer.

It’s really nice looking back and seeing how much I’ve improved

A lot of these works, as I mentioned, are from the early 2000’s circa 2005-2010ish. There’s a lot of growth within the works between the years. Lately, I’ve been down on my current writing because I’m in the middle of everything, throwing a pity party that my writing is stale, blah blah blah. Thankfully, looking back at where I started has helped me see that I have come a long way in the last 15+ years.

I can’t wait to see where I’ll be in the next 15 years as I keep moving forward and making improvements in my craft and my writing.

 

Writer Life Lesson #12: Keep Moving Forward!

How often does it happen that we decide to take breaks and then never return to the project we started? Quite often actually. We, as writers, decide that the project will never meet our expectations, or that there is a better, more urgent idea that needs to come first. This is a pretty common occurance and it can happen for several reasons, but it can be reversed.

This week’s lesson is: Keep Moving Forward.

The Disney movie, Meet the Robinsons had it right. As writers and creators we need to keep moving forward. This isn’t to say that we need to abandon those unfinished projects, or stay tied to them if we feel they are going nowhere. There are several ways to move forward, and whatever works best for you is the best way to move forward.

Sometimes moving forward with your project means going back to the beginning stages of writing. I can’t tell you the number of times I have returned to my very first outline and reoutlined or added several scenes. When you reach the end of one stage, it is often the beginning of the next stage. Just because you return to an old project, or restart another project does not mean you are moving backwards. Sometimes moving backwards is moving forward in terms of creation.

The opposite is true too. Sometimes moving forward is deciding to not continue a project, or idea. Still, last week’s lesson rings true. You can decide to stop working on a project, and decide that it isn’t working in the present time, but don’t throw it away. Years or decades later you could read through it and find a solution. There are several projects of mine that I have put on hiatus throughout my high school and early college years that only now, as I am working on a different project, I realize how they can all connect and how I need to finish several of them to make sense.

This lesson applies more to just writing too. To advance, we need to keep moving forward and keep learning and growing as individuals. Personally, I think about this a lot. This week especially, I considered deleting the entire blog challenge for this month and pretending like it never even existed. I decided that would not be honest of me. It is a blog challenge and though it was supposed to be in May, some of it might expand into June.

This lesson also rings true to me because I finally continued writing my novel this week. It’s the first words I have written for that novel since mid March. The story of that is long and complicated, with a lot of excuses to avoid it and work on other projects, but I came back to it. I know I have to keep moving forward with its progress. All throughout April and the beginning of this month, I have been distracted by other things, finals, essays and studying for my NCLEX to name a few, and I have had the urge to return to the first book in the series to edit, because that is the most comfortable option.

Sometimes, leaving a project is moving forward. In the case of my series, which is fluctuating between seven and nine books, if I continue to focus on the first book (which I have rewritten 3 times already), I will remain stagnant and it will take me decades to just publish one book. So, I am letting it sit and working on the rest of the series (more specifically book 2) to make it feel new again.

Moving Forward can mean several different things to several different people. To keep moving forward, just do what works best for you. Whether it’s going back to a previous project, or leaving a project to marinate.

Keep Moving Forward and making progress!