My God, What have I DONE?!

I had the sudden urge to look over my first Na No Wri Mo project that I never finished back from 2009.

I read the freakin' first chapter and screamed My God, What Have I Done? because I did the one thing that I knew better than to do when I was writing this, because I'd thought I became Olderand Wiser since my Old Shame days.

I created a protagonist who was a terrible, terrible Gary Stu.

The whole entire chapter is everyone praising him, agreeing with his theories, etc. I basically wrote how right this guy is despite what should be his own inexperience (he's a freakin' college freshman for goodness sakes). And let's not get to how his personal beliefs are drastically similar to my own to a T, and of course he's right about them.

Just reading back on the monster I've created has made me downright reluctant to even read any of the rest. I'm scared of how much worse I've made him without even realizing it.

I have a feeling the only solution is to kill it with fire.

Have any of you had this happen to you before, where you look back on a work and hate it? Even if you haven't, do you have any advice on how to move on with this, if possible?

Even when your hope is gone, move along, move along just to make it through

Now I remember that story where I named my heroine Asakiyluna.

OH GOD IT BURNS

Warm hugs and morally questionable advice given here. Prosey Bitchfest

Dear Lord, this happens every time I look back on anything I wrote more than even a month ago.

Very recently, I was going through my file box searching for an old copy of my high school's Alma Mater sheet music because I felt like transcribing the words onto it, and came across some old stuff that I wrote for the speedwriting team back in 2008. I didn't even want to look at them, let alone read them.

Now that I think about it, joining the speedwriting team was a huge mistake because every last one of my pieces were essentially overly dark anecdotes from a larger work. I'm a novel writer who lovingly plans out plots and characters for years, even, not someone who comes up with strokes of junior high school-grade genius in the span of thirty minutes.

edited 4th Jul '11 1:57:17 PM by CrystalGlacia

"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."

Why do you think I mentally blocked out the days of my creative writing class in high school?

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

The title of my 4th grade writing project:

Alexander's Catch 22.

Shoot me. I referred to a book I didn't even know what it was about.

^ Hehe. In 4th grade, I wrote a Pikachu & Tony Montana story against the entire city police force. What a badly, my teacher had said we could write anything we wanted! Good times.

Can I read it? Sounds like an interesting Crack Fic.

Don't we already have a thread about your Old Shames?

But yeah, I'm certainly not immune to this reaction. It's not the usual pattern of "teen discovers fanfiction, writes horrific Sue-fic about favorite work" because I don't write fanfiction, but looking at my old works can still be nightmare-inducing. The abuse of telling over showing! The baffling, non-causally related plots! And the spelling - the only part of my old works I've outright changed, because looking at one more "villian" would have driven me mad.

This wasn't even during my teenage days though, this was two years ago, when I was supposed to have known better! D:

Maybe I'm just a hack after all...

Even when your hope is gone, move along, move along just to make it through

@Chihuahua: No, I'm afraid. The English textbook, in tatters, lies somewhere at the back of my closets underneath grey dust. But I can summarize:

Tony Montana captures one wild Pikachu in the forests, and when he comes back to his mansion home it was smoking and in ruins. A police car nearby, Tony immediately thinks the police have done this, and he puts his Pikachu to good use.

Bam! Police car is electrocuted. Tony slaps hands with his Pikachu - pikapi! when suddenly more police arrive!

Tony grabs his rifle and it's a wild goose chase into the downtown city.

There, Tony decides to have an ultimate showdown, and as Pikachu electrifies the bullets, Tony goes wild! (Don't worry, he don't shoot innocent people.)

The last wave of police come, with their tanks and helicopters. There looks like no way out for the two. So what does Tony do? He grabs Pikachu and throws the yellow furball as far high up into the air as he can, and Pikachu makes the ultimate thunderstorm.

All the police explode! But Pikachu has sacrificed life and body to do this, and Tony mourns him in the aftermath.

At the end, Tony finds a woman to fall in love with, and they get happily married. —The End.

Ja.. I was young, man. That time, I didn't know there were major consequences to be had, mm'kay?

edited 4th Jul '11 2:46:16 PM by QQQQQ

Ah, it's always such a nice illusion to think "my days of stupidity are all far behind me!" Unfortunately, after so many years, you start to notice the pattern. You will never escape from looking back and saying "my god, I was so STUPID back then." This law applies equally to writing as it does to the rest of life.

I know, I know there will come a day when I look back at what I wrote just today and be utterly appalled at how shitty it is.

It'll be called tomorrow.

*

*

^{And in the case of writing, editing is your best friend in this regard. Editing is progress, and improvement, which is once again all you can really hope for.}

edited 4th Jul '11 2:59:30 PM by deathjavu

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

^ Progress is good. It also works both ways though; there are some things I'd wrote, which now sound quite genius in hindsight - and that there's no way I can ever write something like that again.

Hm.

It's generally been my experience that, even though there were plenty of things I thought I could never replicate...well, I never did replicate them.

I generally made them better.

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

I've been having the inverse problem. In these last couple of weeks I've been making mistakes in my writing that I knew how to avoid months, or even a few years ago. I'm in a slump, and I'm trying to work/write my way out of it.

QQQQ, you will probably think lowly of me for saying this, but I think your pikachu/ tony montana story sounds AMAZING. Where can I read it? :D :D

To the OP:

"Maybe I'm just a hack after all... "

One of the books about writing that I have is "On Writing", by Stephen King. The most useful advice he gives for writing can be resumed in "Read and write a lot. Read EVERYTHIN Ga, from pamphlets to books on zoology to magazines and instruction manuals. Write even if you feel you´re only moving piles of shit from one side to another".

I feel like this from time to time: the chapters I write feel cold, like they´ve been done a gazillion times before, I think the characters are plain, the prose filled with errors, etc. But this advice has kept me going, and so far I´ve written one and a half novels, none of them published but still recognized by those who have read them as being moderately good. If I had read my work, decided "this is shit" and quit, I would never had written those two novels and, worst of all, I would never have gotten better at writing :)

Suffer not the witch to live.

I remember creating a character, then realizing she came off as a God-Mode Sue. I tried to counterbalance it both by weakening her, and by introducing drawbacks to her powers, then realized I'd made her a Sympathetic Sue. So I tried to make her less likeable, then worried she was a Jerkass Sue. I never did figure out how to redeem her. (The basic problem was that she gained a lot of power without earning or wanting it.)

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

I've been pretty good about not making Sues and Stus. I can only think of one example, and it was more of a minor Sue than a "EVERYBODY LOVES ME!" Sue.

MWUAHAHAHAHA!

I wrote a horrible Dragonball Z self-insert fic for a writing assignment in fifth grade.

How did the teacher react?

MWUAHAHAHAHA!

Just a few years ago when I was trying to be edgy. Augh that stuff needs to be burnt. Why was I so stupid as a 16/17 year old.

Oh right. Because I read darkfic and thought "ooh I wanna do that"

"Ooh I wanna do that", or the equivalent, is probably responsible for more terrible fiction then any other mental phrase in the history of the world.

Oh gosh yes.

MWUAHAHAHAHA!

I made a character for a creative writing assignment, and a few months after I turned it in I met with my teacher to catch up. When that character came up in a conversation, I said "he's kind of an asshole."

Now, nearly four years later and having edited the crap out of that assignment, I STILL think he's an asshole — and as such, receives his comeuppance on a regular basis.

Writing. A sacred medium in which torturing your characters is an acceptable practice.

My Wattpad — A haven for delightful degeneracy

But "I wanna do that", or some equivalent, is probably also responsible for all the good fiction in the world.

Who would ever write if they didn't read something good and think "I wanna make something like that"?

Because you were (presumably) a human.

edited 4th Jul '11 10:31:51 PM by deathjavu

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

I've been rereading my old shame as preparation for going all Six Billion Dollar Man on its ass. Mostly, I was really horrific about unecessary padding things happening, and for having my characters be horrible drama queens who gushed with vividly violet emotions at the poke of a finger. They were like big balls of overemotional goo. And the hell of it is, people liked it.

However, the upside is, I can laugh at it very easily, which is fun.

"Proto-Indo-European makes the damnedest words related. It's great. It's the Kevin Bacon of etymology." ~Madrugada