Adventures in Exploring Past Writings
Jan. 27th, 2022 01:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
driseogI'm currently working on transcribing a notebook I kept with fanfiction ideas a few years ago. It's odd, looking back at the beginnings of ideas I'm still using, as well as things I've forgotten that I came up with.
Some of it is straight-up cringey, a lot of it is just unpolished and raw ideas I threw on the page, and a few ideas are actually pretty promising. I've actually been adding to it as I go along, shifting ideas and fleshing out stuff I brainstormed.
It's sort of fun to see what I was thinking. (Looking back I totally Mary-Sue-ified one of my favorite characters. Some of the stuff I imagined them being able to do is absolutely hog wild.)
It's also fascinating to see how much my handwriting changes from day to day, or from the start of a selection to the end. it always starts out so neat and pretty and then evolves to this awful chicken scratch. I interchange between cursive and print and there's some cursive in here that I can't make out at all.
I ended up getting so tired of typing that I started doing speech-to-text to transcribe some of it. It was a bit odd but went much faster. I'll likely do it again, so yay for assistive technology!
The weirdest part of this was looking at work from three to five years ago. I was in a completely different headspace, and I hadn't written much in terms of fanfic. I think (and hope!) I've improved a lot in my writing skills, and I keep coming up with more ideas and rewriting some of these bizarre writings that I'll likely never use, or only use as jumping-off points that I'll keep evolving.
Moral of the story? Keep your AWFUL old writing. It's absolutely amazing to see where you started and sometimes helpful to rediscover ideas.
Some of it is straight-up cringey, a lot of it is just unpolished and raw ideas I threw on the page, and a few ideas are actually pretty promising. I've actually been adding to it as I go along, shifting ideas and fleshing out stuff I brainstormed.
It's sort of fun to see what I was thinking. (Looking back I totally Mary-Sue-ified one of my favorite characters. Some of the stuff I imagined them being able to do is absolutely hog wild.)
It's also fascinating to see how much my handwriting changes from day to day, or from the start of a selection to the end. it always starts out so neat and pretty and then evolves to this awful chicken scratch. I interchange between cursive and print and there's some cursive in here that I can't make out at all.
I ended up getting so tired of typing that I started doing speech-to-text to transcribe some of it. It was a bit odd but went much faster. I'll likely do it again, so yay for assistive technology!
The weirdest part of this was looking at work from three to five years ago. I was in a completely different headspace, and I hadn't written much in terms of fanfic. I think (and hope!) I've improved a lot in my writing skills, and I keep coming up with more ideas and rewriting some of these bizarre writings that I'll likely never use, or only use as jumping-off points that I'll keep evolving.
Moral of the story? Keep your AWFUL old writing. It's absolutely amazing to see where you started and sometimes helpful to rediscover ideas.
