What is your writing journey? Do you ever open an old file and read some of your earliest writing?
Many people, when asked the first question, will talk about how they had always been writers, crayoning their whims when they weren't much older than toddlers. The second question is a little more complicated for these people: They will wistfully recall the poem or short story that won them an award in elementary school, but when asked about their middle school and high school writing, they'll sour up like they'd just bitten into a lime. Ask them about what they wrote yesterday, and they'll waver between pride and insecurity.
My experience is a little different.
In elementary school, I figured myself to be the uncreative type. If I wasn't running around causing mischief, I much preferred reading to writing. If any form of writing, even two sentences assigned in response to a passage from a book, got between me and a good story... well, that assignment was just going to have to wrack up a D or F. Despite the fact that I had a college-level Lexile and frequently read the most books of my classmates (likely in large part because I had a habit of reading 5 or 6 books at a time and did not slow the pace on any of them), my grades were always the poorest in reading and writing.
I vividly remember moments when the books were cubbied and we were each given our composition notebook. We were going to write, the teacher said. I was a lucky young student in that all my teachers in elementary school were very kind and very good at what they did, but I fear I was the kind of student they dreaded. Between uninspired sentences about a man and his dog, I wrote poems about time dragging on forever and drew comics about a duck and a cow, two of my sister's favorite animals at the time, that contributed to global warming and died horrific, stupid deaths.
And still, despite my worst efforts, my teacher was enamored with the poem about time and encouraged me to think about becoming a writer.
The only thing I wrote between then and seventh grade was an assigned speech for the fifth grade graduation, and to my dismay, my speech was selected to be read. As I voiced the words I'd put on the page, I felt no love for them; only fear and irritation and boredom, but I suspect these emotions had roots in other, deeper psychological issues plaguing me at the time.
It was in sixth grade, during one of my many nights of insomnia, that my main character took shape. The more I learned about his life, his friends, his world, the more I wished it was my own. So I dreamed.
In seventh grade I began writing longhand again, voluntarily. Other story ideas had also cropped up, and by this time, I had become more confident in myself and less confident that I could find fun books to read that would still challenge me. The Sigma Initiative, unnamed and barely recognizable, was the only one of these stories to make it into a Word document.
Maybe another time, I'll finish the story of how I became a writer. But for the rest of this post, I will examine the experience of reading the oldest version of this story.
In my initial dreamings of this main character, he existed in the present day with a Narnia-esque link to a fantasy world. Originally he was a man who was scientist, but I quickly remembered what I had learned from the disappointing dog story sentences: I didn't know how to write adults. And so he became a boy.
When I tried telling his story in a fantasy world, though, I immediately lost all interest. It felt mundane, it felt like it had been done too many times before, and because, still, to this day, one of my greatest fears is that I am uncreative, I nearly abandoned the story. The character lived in the present real world, and the story was going to take place in the present real world, so the fantasy element was only present to justify the ability that set my main character apart from any other character. And even as a middle schooler, I knew that was a bad idea.
So I settled for writing his story without explanation of anything, and as a result, he had amnesia. If he didn't know, and if none of the other characters knew, no one else would have to know, surely.
Little did I know that his amnesia would become an element so personal and necessary for me as the author.
That little tidbit aside, I also, until a year ago, was dead set on telling the story in first person, and it wasn't until last year that I realized that it was the first person telling, among other serious issues, that were crippling the entire story.
Below are the very first two paragraphs of my first typed version of the story, originating from when I was in eighth grade:
What finally brought me to my senses was the chokingly rancid smell. It was overpowering, and right then I would have been anywhere but there. As a matter of fact, where was I?
The thought slipped through my mental fingers as I started to sit up. Immediately, I wished that I hadn’t; gravity seemed to be doing somersaults, leaving me to tumble helplessly. I could faintly hear the dull thunk of my head hitting whatever I was laying on, and I laid there for who knows how long before I came up with the will to get away from that unbearable smell.
What do I feel when I read this? Some curiosity, some shame, but mostly skepticism in my unearned confidence with words. I blatantly use and adverb. The pacing is bad. The voice is obnoxious. The hook is far from gripping.
But I can't help but realize that I was actually pretty okay at describing physical sensations. I got the order of perceptions right. I had already laid the foundation for an entire scene within the first few sentences.
When I go back and read my old writing, I struggle to feel any sense of recognition, but I do come upon a re-understanding of myself. The characters now are almost nothing alike to how they appear in the first attempts, and so is the case for the person that wrote them. And for both, I think it is for the better.