I started writing in high school so as you can imagine my first story was pretty angsty, and also full of grammatical errors. I remember being so proud when I wrote it, then a few years ago I went back and read it again just for the nostalgia and I couldn't help but laugh at how horrible it was. I like to think of that story as what gave me the passion to write, but definitely not an indicator of the quality of my work.
The word abysmal comes to mind. Of course, I was only five years old. I had the good sense to lose that story somewhere in middle school. Annnnd to be totally fair, I've had a few abysmal efforts in adulthood, too. You work on it. You write it (or it writes you) and, when you reach a point where you realize it is a black hole, you toss it into the bottom of a drawer and focus on something else ... at least it kept you from playing in the streets!
I put it on a text analyzer and it said I write like Dan Brown. So I guess it's open to interpretation either it was bad or not. But I think it was pretty bad. And to not miss the point of the thread: I found some really bad old fictions... Eye burning fiction
That completely reminded me of a story I wrote in the 6th grade. All I remember is that it was ghost/horror type thing... never found out what the grade was because we moved I continue to randomly wonder what the teacher thought of it. The thing I know for sure was his shock at the length of the darn thing. Only marginally better than my first, in my own opinion. At least it's coherent now... and not a blatant rip-off of anything.
my first story was pretty bad and they are still that way at the moment! but I'll keep trying to improve
Hi, I've thought about putting my newer writings on a text analyzer site, but I'm worried that it's going to come back and tell me that my style is similar to that of an alcohol dependent monkey! Cheers, Greg.
Absolutely, utterlly, depressingly, bad. There is an age old saying, some of you may have heard, others may have only felt, that was told to me once upon a time. It goes something like, "Bad writing is bad writing." My first ever story, was me just bleeding out what I thought was going to be a great fantasy series. No doubt fueled by the excitement that was my youth and a good portion of my early adult-hood. Unfortunately, I made it about 200 pages in before I found out everything was gibberish. The pages filled with non-sense and redundancies that would make space and time seem like simple concepts. Though I have not thrown the story/idea away, since that was one thing I recieved great feed back on, I told myself I would stop writing long pieces until my skill was good enough to take on an endeavor of such. Even now, a lot of my work is horrible. I have quite some time to go, and a lot more to learn. It's a hell of a lot of fun though, I will tell you that much. Sometimes things have to get bad before they get worse. And then sometimes, just when you think things could not get worse, you travel to the very depths of hell, before you suddenly climb out and make your ascension to heaven. -Ghost
LOL, there's an awful lot of self deprecation going on in here... I can never figure out which is worse, a writer who thinks they're worse than they are, or one who thinks they're better than they are... one thing's for certain, no one ever seems to have a completely accurate perception of their own abilities for one reason or another My agent recently told me I should have more confidence in myself, so I HOPE I'm in the 'underestimates their abilities' camp. But then again, she could just have been humoring me... *self confidence goes back in it's kennel*
My brother said something to me recently that I found quite interesting. He said, "Isn't it funny how the pieces you really want others to read and are super confident about, end up being your worse, when the pieces you want to hide away, lock in a steamer trunk, to reside until end of days never to be seen by another pair of eyes except maybe yourself, end up being your best work?" I find this to be true to a certain extent, for me at least. When I get overly excited about a piece and tell my self, "Yeah, that story was fire." Usually, it's horrible and filled with mistakes. However, I do think there is a fine line that exists between confidence and pride. You can certainly pump out a piece that makes your own heart swell, because you know you wrote every ounce of it within those lines. It feels good to accomplish something, and it feels good to feel good. So there is the extent of truth, for I think there are certainly times where you finish a piece and you are confident, proud, and excited for others to read it, because you want to share it with people.
There is, but I'm of the belief that as long as it's not inhibiting me from writing, believing my writing sucks is fine with me. If the day ever comes that I think it's decent, then I may have problems.
My first was when I was 17, my English was rubbish then. I'm totally ashamed of how proud of it I was at the time. lol
I began writing "stuff" when I was around 7-8 years old, and boy, my writing was awful--literally! But, I love that it revealed what an imagination I had. When I started to really love stories was when my mom made my sister and I write a short story every day for school (with being home-schooled). I haven't read the stories since I wrote them, but I think most of them were "And, I woke up and it was all a dream" or "I fell into the water and found a mermaid world." There is one I remember thinking was the best. It was about a boy and girl finding a button on the ground and it ended up being a teleporter. Yep. Then, there's when I was 14-15 and whatever I read, that's how I wrote. It makes me cringe, but when I think back those were my times of learning how to write like the pros. It helped me find my own voice in writing.
I did EXACTLY the same thing. Sometimes I even copied the plot but tried to write it a little differently to see how I could change it. Kinda like fanfic I guess.
