i’ve always been a writer.
writing has constantly been one of my all-time favorite things to do: ever since i was little, i used to scribble words down on the page in the hope that they would form eloquent stories.
so, i was going through some old Google Docs the other day when i stumbled across a couple of stories that i had written in ELEMENTARY school!
but to say that these stories were eloquent would be the Overstatement Of The Year™. i was in fourth grade when i wrote most of them, so i could definitely tell how my writing has improved since then…
and of course, i’ve decided to embarrass myself in front of all of YOU as well by starting a new series on my blog in which i react to my old writing! this should be fun…
THE DETAILS:
i’m starting this series by reacting to just ONE story over the span of around 5 blog posts, as the story is 4,000 words long and i don’t want y’all to have to read a 6,00 word blog post haha.
the story is titled “Lost In The Snow” and was written by me when i was in fourth grade! *nervous gulp* you can see all of its stats over on the left.
each post, i’ll react to 2 pages of the story, and in the final post, i’ll react to the last 3 pages!
let’s just get right into this mess post…
what is this font and color formatting?? i have no idea what would have caused my younger self to write in this atrocious font and BRIGHT PURPLE FONT COLOR. like, how am i even supposed to read it?!
yet i somehow managed to get through reading it all! here are my reactions to the actual content of the first four paragraphs…
- why why why did i italicize the ENTIRE first line of dialogue? it looks so weird hahaha
- i remember, i used to always start stories with dialogue because i thought it was the only good hook out there… 😳😳
- ok, but the dialogue in paragraph 3 has a colon in it, and the person speaking is probably a 5 year-old. ugh.
- i guess i’m just going to keep talking about dialogue, because a lot of this dialogue is unnecessary! it reads like it’s very scripted instead of organic.
- can we just ignore the fact that this entire first paragraph is just info-dumping? please??
- oh, more strange dialogue! 🤦♀️ i remember that Sophie talked about this in her (very amazing!!) post about writing tips that you should all read, but when we’re younger, school teaches us to not use the word “said” when describing dialogue. and, of course, i just had to use ONLY synonyms of “said’ for dialogue in all my writing back then! this was something that made my writing look VERY juvenile.
- also, for some reason, i only wrote straight, white characters when i was younger! (there’s nothing wrong with writing these characters sometimes, but please write diverse characters as well!!) i’ve definitely grown out of this by now, but reading old writing makes me sad, as i can’t believe i rarely used to express my own culture through writing.
- “Now, let’s make breakfast!” < am i writing a story or a how-to piece with transitions …?
- oh, wow, i actually used the word “said” for the dialogue!! (look at me contradicting myself) but it still looks a bit juvenile, as the actual dialogue itself is just so boring.
- i used WAY too many exclamation points in my writing back then 😅😂
- another thing i’ve noticed so far is that my writing mostly runs on dialogue.
- i’m constantly using dialogue to fill in as description! i probably thought that doing this would make the descriptions “smoother,” but it ended up doing just the opposite…
- “We turned to look at Fluff,” is the last (and very boring) sentence of the first two pages, but we’ve reached the end for this first installment in the series! here are my final thoughts…
OVERALL:
like i admitted above, i think i underestimated my old writing! i wasn’t *utterly horrified* with anything other than my formatting choices. however, this story could obviously use some improvement!
i don’t want anyone to be thinking “oh, she’s so self-deprecating and negative,” because all my commentary is for fun and to see how different my writing was back then! one of the main ideas i had with what i wanted this series to convey is the numerous lessons i’ve learned about writing over the years, and the only way we learn from our mistakes is to look back and grow from them.
i’m planning on sharing all the lessons and final verdicts in the last post of this series, so stay tuned for that!
honestly, i’m pretty happy with my fourth grader self, because at least i actually wrote stuff back then instead of procrastinating working on my WIPs. *pointed glare at my present self*
i hope that you enjoyed reading this, i’m really excited to share the rest of the series with you!!
have you ever gone back to read old stories? do you ever use atrocious font + color combinations? what do you think of ‘Lost In The Snow’ so far?
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