Welcome to IWSG Day. The goal of this blog hop is to
share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of
appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer
assistance and guidance. It’s a haven for insecure writers of all kinds. IWSG
is the brainchild of our ninja leader Alex Cavanaugh. Thank
you to co-hosts for the February posting of the IWSG are J Lenni Dorner, Victoria Marie Lees, and Sandra Cox! For
links to all contributors, click here.
Optional February 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?
My favorite part of re-reading old pieces is recognizing the
improvement in my writing. I’d only written non-fiction and poetry when I
attempted my first piece of fiction. A blogger I followed offered a contest in
which she provided the first and last sentence of a short story. Contestants had
to fill in the middle with a specific maximum word count. I gave it a go and ended
up astonished. Who knew I could write a story?
Of course I didn’t win. There were all sorts of structure problems. But who
cares? It started something. Another blog offered daily writing prompts and I
used them to challenge myself. Eventually, a few more contests brought a
mention or two, enough to keep me going. A scene storming exercise led to my
first novel attempt, a bomb, but ten years later I got back to it. Now it’s a
fully realized manuscript.
The gist is, a lot of my early work is emphatically cringeworthy, but
so what? Writing is like everything else. The longer we practice the better we
get. Those early words are the pilings beneath the pier. They support what’s built
on top of it.
How do you feel about your early writing?
