That Was Then, This is Now

One thing I did not do, unfortunately, is keep a lot of the old poems and stories I started years ago. A great deal were thrown away, taken, lost-- I didn't exactly lock them down and I never really noticed that people tended to help themselves to my drawings and writing. I'm not too terribly upset about it because art is ahead, not behind. Nostalgia can be fun, but I definitely keep better track of my work now, at least in terms of saving multiple copies and leaving a digital footprint.

I'd love to be able to share some of my embarrassingly bad older work with you, but whatever remnants I have left would require a bit of digging. I might make a week of that next time I dig through storage, just scan up a bunch of story snippets, pictures, etc. to throw at a retro post.

I can give you a preview of what it was at least. I wouldn't say I was bad at writing ever. Inexperienced, yes, but I never had a lot of difficulty communicating my thoughts and feelings with writing. That's one of its greatest appeals, actually; it gave me a place to amend my speech blunders and decide how I really thought about things.

Stories were written as radio plays at one point, I remember that. My sister had some book on writing radio plays and it's a format that favors conversations. When you're young especially, there's far more appeal in character interaction than the environment or other aspects. It's very like screenplay writing, only you don't need to consider the props, and the direction is tailored towards describing what the audience can't see.

Oy, and anime was a big influence, so the conversations were a lot of cheese. In fact, my first book had to get a LOT of conversations redone because they were simply too awful. When I decided to turn it into a book, I decided I still loved the plots, still loved the writing style. It's very direct and doesn't dance around, which is something I did not really get when I was younger.

Bad, bad, bad romance. Like most teenage girls, I was in love with the idea of love. In love with controversy and conflict, but it mostly came off as whining and pining and courting assholes and entitlement. Almost all stories just kind of dropped off after they kissed or had sex because the chase was gone and so was my interest. At that point in my life, the longevity of love just looked boring and anticlimactic so I had no clue how to continue. When I would reread it to try to see where it could go, I'd end up seeing so many inconsistencies, zero plot, or just loathing a character so much, I had no desire to save it.

What's different now? Well, I've always loved words, but I've absorbed a lot more and I'm not afraid to use them. I try not to go full nerd, but I do have a love for procedurals and medical shows, so I'm not shy on word use. They say not to flex your ego too much, write simple, don't show off, which I do aim for, but I'm also against dumbing down. Writers are often told to also avoid a string of 'very' verbs, to beef up your synonyms. This comes naturally to me, so no, I don't always have to crack open the thesaurus, and often the perfect word is one I might assume in more common use than it is. In most cases, I do make sure the context holds up regardless.

I don't feel the need to always rhyme in poetry, but rhythm is important in my writing. I like to break flow, use something more lyrical in writing, like with limericks or haiku. The rhythm is there, but it's subtle and doesn't suffer when scattered. I'm also not a total pantser anymore. I enjoy planning and dropping in more complexity. I like planting plots that will grow later, hinting at things, popping in cameos without being too campy.

No more anime small-talk. Number one, I'm not Japanese and I've lived a life full of inspiration and unique and shared experiences as myself, not a character in an anime or a subculture of otaku fangirls. I don't aim to write as a white woman, but I certainly don't entertain that my knowledge of Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, Chinese culture is planted firmly enough to make it a choice that is authentic to my voice. I do take the influences they've lent to my art and plotting because that IS an authentic angle. However, I'm not looking to just mirror more magical girl bullshit when my foray into fantasy is about interpreting my ideas, not the overdone trends.

It's no longer about MY fantasies either. When I decided to write something to be shared, I removed the sense of ideals. I wrote about things that make me uncomfortable, I wrote about relationships I didn't understand, I researched things I knew very little about. Writing is not just about an ego-dump or a flexing of brain muscle, it's also about what can be learned and explored. I don't need to control everything and the characters don't all have to be extensions of me or inspired by my friends or related to anything in reality at all.

What's the most different about my writing is that I don't insert a bias. I don't expect the writer to like the characters I like or hate the ones I hate. I write characters that blur the lines because the idea of perfect ordered morality is sheer indoctrination of thought. In my youth, I made it clear that you should love or hate a person and often even made a big show of when you were supposed to feel the opposite. Hey, the bad guy is so good now! Never mind all of the horrible shit they did because the heroine loves them now so you should too! (Still a better love story than Twilight, even if it sounds almost exactly like it...)

To be honest, I don't find it that useful to look back on how I used to write or how I used to draw. I can't really say time makes me better. Time changes my perspective, what I want out of my crafts. We do refine things, learn our style and our voice, but we're also a product of what we like at any given time and once those tastes change, it's not that the old was 'bad' just that it's not appealing to us anymore. A lot of people dig my earlier stuff, so it's just self-criticism that colors those backwards glances.

Downing on what you were or liked is a defense mechanism, but you don't have to do that to get 'better' either. I can appreciate that part of my development, can understand it was part of forming my current tastes. It's not necessary to downplay what I drew or wrote or felt, so even when I say I cringe, the teenage me is also reminding me that "I don't understand me!". Probably why I tend to connect to kids. I get it. People don't understand them. I didn't and don't understand me. I don't get why I was the way I was as a teenager, I don't get me now, but I'm also a lot more accepting of the things that were necessary to survive and thrive. What I have left of those days is what it is. I move forward, with writing, with art, with discovery. I get why other writers and authors and creatives in general are okay with not obsessing on finished work, even forgetting it. There's always more to do.