![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
khiemtranI was clearing out some boxes yesterday, when I came across an old school diary from when I was around 15. In it were some sci-fiction stories I had written. The diary had to be thrown out, sadly, but it was enlightening to sit and read my own stories as an outsider.
In general, I cringed at the start of every story. Some of the stories that I can remember liking at the time, now read as unbelievably naive. The prose too, was remarkably flat and filled with cliches. But, at the same time, there was a surprising amount of inventiveness there. There was no cleverness in the writing, but there was cleverness of concept. Seemingly shallow ideas became deep without warning. A story that started out as a trite computer-programs-as-people story shifted gear suddenly and became a story about people living in the city of the mind, which then became a story about the city of my mind. The things I remember being proud of - prose and vocabularly, for example, didn't seem special at all now, but there was definitely something there that I wasn't aware of at the time - a good hand for taking the story in surprising directions and coming up with simple, evocative ideas.
Despite the cliches and the lack of description, there was a complete lack of awkward sentences. There was no artifice or wordplay, just cool stories simply told. Thinking about it now, they weren't stories that I wrote because I thought they were important, they were stories that I wrote because I thought they were cool. They were fun to write because they were fun to read. (There was one story I wrote at that time that was important though, The Fire Laughs, but it wasn't in the diary.) Most of the stories were also written in a single sitting, sometimes for homework. They were done quickly enough that they were still fun. I'm wondering now if I can still write like that, if I can still sit down and spill out a story, without worrying about style and prose and cliches. Reading that diary, even after cringing at the openings, I couldn't help thinking that here was an author that I'd like to read from.
In general, I cringed at the start of every story. Some of the stories that I can remember liking at the time, now read as unbelievably naive. The prose too, was remarkably flat and filled with cliches. But, at the same time, there was a surprising amount of inventiveness there. There was no cleverness in the writing, but there was cleverness of concept. Seemingly shallow ideas became deep without warning. A story that started out as a trite computer-programs-as-people story shifted gear suddenly and became a story about people living in the city of the mind, which then became a story about the city of my mind. The things I remember being proud of - prose and vocabularly, for example, didn't seem special at all now, but there was definitely something there that I wasn't aware of at the time - a good hand for taking the story in surprising directions and coming up with simple, evocative ideas.
Despite the cliches and the lack of description, there was a complete lack of awkward sentences. There was no artifice or wordplay, just cool stories simply told. Thinking about it now, they weren't stories that I wrote because I thought they were important, they were stories that I wrote because I thought they were cool. They were fun to write because they were fun to read. (There was one story I wrote at that time that was important though, The Fire Laughs, but it wasn't in the diary.) Most of the stories were also written in a single sitting, sometimes for homework. They were done quickly enough that they were still fun. I'm wondering now if I can still write like that, if I can still sit down and spill out a story, without worrying about style and prose and cliches. Reading that diary, even after cringing at the openings, I couldn't help thinking that here was an author that I'd like to read from.
