Old Writing

My cousin visited us over the weekend and we went to see Voyage of the Dawn Treader together. It was amazing.

She ended up getting stuck at our place because of the worst snow storm in 20 years that we've had. We got 20 inches of snow in one night, even the plows were called off the road, and the roof of the Metrodome collapsed.

So what did an anime artist and a writer do while trapped inside for a weekend? Sit in our pajamas and talk about stories, of course!

She drew pictures of people, anime style, of some of my stories and some of her own as we told them to each other. It was a lot of fun.
She asked me to get out some of my older work, the story ideas that I never wrote into a full piece of fiction.

So I did and I was amazed at what I found. There were ideas I don't even remember writing. Some of them were painfully corny, while others were startlingly original and creative. It changed my perspective about my own writing today. Some of it will be obviously bad, some of it will be enjoyable. And overall, it's worth it to write.

Have you ever looked back on some of your own ancient writing? What did you think? Did you find it terrible, or awesome, or a little bit of both? Did it make you smile?

I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

(PS Something else I discovered this weekend was that my cousin had all her story ideas stem from characters she'd made up while drawing, while all my stories stemmed from interesting plot twists and denouements. Someday I wonder if we'll team up to become super heros who write fabulous stories.)