Do you hate your writing?

[Tentacles]

Specifically, if I may rephrase. Do you ever look back at your old work from eight years ago and wonder why in the world you fell in love with the story you were writing at that point?

I'm finding a lot of old stories (turns out I've been writing sense 2007) that are drastically different from what I considering myself interested in writing at this point. Like in my old work, I seemed to not be familiar with the concept of subtlety.

Does this ever happen to you the more you write stories for visual novels?

[RotGtIE]

Self-loathing is the natural state of the writer.

[Kailoto]

Self-loathing is the natural state of the writer artist.

Fixed. It's not just us.

Seriously though, 99% of the people that I know will look back on their previous work and loathe it, myself included. We might acknowledge it, and be willing to show it as long as we can stress how terrible it is, but I don't think I've met anyone who is satisfied with their older work - only people who don't progress are exempt.

[trooper6]

but I don't think I've met anyone who is satisfied with their older work - only people who don't progress are exempt.

I think this here is the important point. If you look back at your work for 10 years ago and think it is the best thing ever...that is a sign that you haven't grown as an artist. And that isn't good. Being able to look back and see the error you made then that you wouldn't make now is something to celebrate. Because it means you have gained more skill.

[ketskari]

While I definitely don't feel satisfied with my art*--even stuff I made this morning or last week--I don't have strong feelings about that dissatisfaction, much less hate. You can be critical of your own work, aware of your improvement, etc, without being emotionally moved one way or the other. If anything, I feel driven to do better, and I certainly compete with myself, but I don't hate my old work. That would be a waste of energy.


*Edit: I do both--art and writing, and think of them interchangeably.

[trooper6]

While I definitely don't feel satisfied with my art--even stuff I made this morning or last week--I don't have strong feelings about that dissatisfaction, much less hate. You can be critical of your own work, aware of your improvement, etc, without being emotionally moved one way or the other. If anything, I feel driven to do better, and I certainly compete with myself, but I don't hate my old work. That would be a waste of energy.

I also co-sign this. I don't think it is particularly healthy to be consumed with hate of self or of one's output. Be critical of one's own work, but with a spirit of self love and desire for self improvement.

[Tentacles]

Some of the horror stories I wrote, I couldn't imagine writing now. Not so much because I dislike horror (to the contrary), but looking back on it seems like I fell pray to relying on archetypes and stereotypes.

I have found some stories I could rewrite for Renpy now. Though I'm currently torn as to whether to restart it, or instead just to recycle some of the themes and write essentially a new story.

Like now I wouldn't even consider such a stark contrast between fantasy and science fiction in the same world.

[trevers18]

Absolutely. When I was big on the RP scene, I used to have some super-duper annoying characters who had absolutely no real character traits besides one, which I wrote to hell and back because I thought that's how characters worked. Plus, I used to do stuff like this!!!!! Multiple exclamation marks absolutely drive me insane now, and so do all my old characters. I literally hated their old forms.

As for my old writing, yeah, it was definitely bad a few years ago. I usually don't believe in "practice makes perfect", but for writing, it's really true. The harder you work on creating lovable (or reasonable hate-able) characters and realistic/believable settings, the better you'll get at making them.

[kitsubasa]

I'm with ketskari and trooper on the hatred issue; I don't think hate for old work is particularly productive. Hate, I think, implies a denial of anything valuable or interesting in your artistic past, which means you can't (or won't) learn from what you've done before -- or if you do learn, it'll be a blind, kneejerk reaction away from it, rather than a more considered study.

What I do feel toward my old writing is a mix of shame, disbelief, and confusion. I save all my writing, so I still have everything from when I was 5 years old available for perusal when I feel like it. Obviously, the stuff from when I was a really little kid is just adorable. The real ??? comes from my work ages 11-14 or so, when I was old enough to know basic grammar but my plots/characterisation were pure wish fulfilment.

I think the most bizarre thing I ever put to paper was an 80,000 word Jak and Daxter self-insert fanfic, where my self-insert character ended up representing my denial over being gay. She kept fridging the canonical female characters, and she had four boyfriends. Now that's a weird thing to look back on. But hey, still valuable in its own way, and I'd be wrong to hate it. I settle for mild bewilderment. : )

[Kia]

it's natural to see old things as junk. it's like old cloths, even if you don't outgrow them, they wouldn't stay that fashionable for long. looking at old works is like looking at your old photos in the family album and say: ewww was I really wearing that?

[Tentacles]

That kind of sums of my feelings, hatred is a bit unproductive. I'd rather know why I hate my work as well.

I think I have a lot to study from to learn to grow as a writer though, I'll hope for the best.^^

[somestrangecircus]

I am extremely self-critical about pretty much everything about myself, not just my writing.

[Kuiper]

There's several issues at play here:

People who get into creative work, and who have the ambition to be good, often get into creative endeavors because they have good taste. They start of as a cinephile, and their love and passion for film turns into aspirations to become a director or screenwriter. Or they're an avid reader of fantasy novels, they fall in love with Frank Herbert and George Martin and say, "This amazing thing that these guys do in their writing, I want to achieve the same greatness in my own writing." These kinds of people are often connoisseurs, they're very critical people who like to pick things apart and look at all the flaws in them, and that leads them to appreciate their favorite things even more.

Everyone is bad when they start off. Pete Rose may be the best batter who ever lived (well, arguably), but I can guarantee that his career didn't begin with walking up to the plate for the first time and hitting a home run at his first at-bat. Alfred Cortot didn't play a beautiful concerto the first time he sat down at a piano. It takes practice to get good at something. You need to spend some time banging away at the ivories and using the piano to make noise that sounds quite bad before you can begin playing music that sounds good. The same is true of any discipline, writing included. The first time I sat down at the (computer) keyboard and composed a narrative, it was a barely-coherent jumble of events, with horrid prose and wretched dialog. But I invested time in writing, learned to get better at it, and with time and practice, I got better, to a point where I was quite happy with the work I was producing.

So, here is the problem. You have the critic with great taste, who decides that instead of merely being a consumer, they want to be a creator. So they sit down at the keyboard, hoping to emulate the style and beauty of Fitzgerald's prose and the richness of Jane Austen's characters. But, it's their first time writing, and predictably, their first story is a trainwreck. And this person is a seasoned veteran when it comes to consuming writing. They know a bad story when they see it, and when they look at their own work, if they're not delusional, they'll realize it's bad. And the second attempt is also quite bad. And the third, and the fourth...

You need to spend a lot of time producing work that is bad in order to get to a point where you can produce work that is good. This is a natural part of improving, and in fact, it's a good thing. The ability to recognize your own work as bad is also a good thing--it means you have good taste. However, it does mean that there will be a period when there's a significant gap between the stuff you want to make and the stuff you actually make. In fact, that may last a lifetime--hopefully every writer aspires to be better tomorrow than they were today. There's no solution, other than to tough it out and work at it until you improve to the point where you can be happy with the stuff you make.

[Tentacles]

Yep you hit the nail right on the head and drove it deep. I'm noticing more that my taste in fiction isn't exactly matching the output of things I usually end up creating.

I might intend a Space Opera/Survival Horror/Gothic Romance starting out, but once it gets on paper and is revised about the 12 millionth time it becomes something closer to Neural-punk, and lately children's fantasy story spin offs of my science fiction.

Uh yea, try not to think to deeply about the above cross-genre, I'm not sure how I could have gotten that to work either.:/

[Parataxis]

So my brain generates literally like a story idea a week--and it has, every week, since I was like 10. Most of them are in one ear and out the other, but anything that lasted long enough for me to actually write something on it had SOMETHING going for it. I may cringe a little when looking at my old craft sentence by sentence, but honestly more often now I look back at old projects trying to see what I would do to bring them up to snuff.

That said I also do that with other people's fiction that doesn't quite sit with me so maybe it's just my coping mechanism for bad fiction that bleeds over into my own.