Never Gonna Give You Up? Working with Your Old Writing

This weekend, I revived a story I was working on about six years ago. It’s haunted me ever since–I often refer to it as “my favorite thing I’ve ever written,” and also sometimes, “my cat-killer story.” But I got it in my head that the story was unfinished, like that was its permanent state. 

I’m not sure why, but I think the new Taylor Swift album had me really thinking about the story, so I pulled out my plastic storage bin of journals and writing projects and found the two notebooks containing all of the fragments of this story. I read through the first few paragraphs and I thought, Hey, this is actually pretty good. If you’re feeling insecure about yourself as a writer, a good cure for that is to go back and read your favorite past works: it’s a nice reminder that you can write. And I realized that I can still work on this project. 

My writing time this week has been typing up and revising this story. Rather than feeling daunted by the idea of having to come up with something to write about, I’ve had a plan, so it’s been easy to sit down and start (the hardest part). And it makes me feel less like I never finish anything, because heck, I still just might. 

You probably have your own pile of notebooks or a computer of word documents waiting for you. Maybe now is the time to brush them off and remember why you started them in the first place.