Writing Blog

20220225 Looking back

February 25, 2022, 2:30pm

Thanks to Future Mrs. B and the "Note: This was the first piece I posted to Writing.c...", I went back through my old writings.

I never throw anything away, so it was a matter of pulling out the print-out of a story written on the Commodore-64 with the Word-Writer programme, saved onto 5 1/4" floppy discs.

The oldest story in my collection dates back to 1983, when I was 12 years old, A standard zombie story where all the people who kill the zombies are female. Same year - a vampire story clearly inspired by the TV mini-series version of Salem's Lot (or... blatantly stolen from) where two girls (based on girls I'd gone to school with) kill the vampire.

I am going to say this without fear of contradiction: I have most definitely improved as a writer! But I am impressed by the grammar and punctuation proficiency I showed back then. So that makes me feel better about when I tell people to learn how to use grammar, and those kids on this site who tell me they're still only 16 or whatever are just lazy. If I could do it at age 12, so can anyone if they're 16 or older. I will also say my vocabulary, though not great, was not horrid. However, my sentence structure was repetitive, echo words abound, and I clearly didn't want to use the word "said" in the second story and so must have worn out that page of a thesaurus.

It's fun to look back. It is a good reminder that improvement is always there. But it is also a little bittersweet looking at it and remembering when I thought I was doing so well because I was writing stories, and now I feel I was deluding myself with any real pretence of skill at that age.