palominocorn (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
palominocorn) wrote2020-01-07 04:32 pm
palominocorn) wrote2020-01-07 04:32 pm
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A lot of the stuff I wrote as a teenager was, I believe "cringey" is what the youth are calling it these days.
Super-powerful, highly attractive characters who could do whatever the heck they wanted to do, which was mostly saving the world and raising happy families, and everyone loved them except the villains who were always soundly and embarrassingly defeated in the end. Certainly nothing that will go into the American literary canon.
But honestly? "Create a great work of literature that people will read for hundreds of years" hadn't been my goal. I wrote in order to cope with the miserable life I was going through at the time, to cheer myself up and to imagine what a better future would look like, and also to entertain my friends (who wrote similarly "cringeworthy" stuff).
And in that, I succeeded. As a bonus, I also got better at writing: how to build a consistent and interesting character, how to make a world for them to inhabit, how to string together sentences so that they didn't sound wooden and hollow, how to keep myself motivated to write more than a hundred words in one setting.
Still, even if my writing skills had crystallized when I was thirteen, the joy that I and my friends got from writing together would have been worth it all. It wasn't about "quality" according to whatever strangers on the internet defined that as.
Super-powerful, highly attractive characters who could do whatever the heck they wanted to do, which was mostly saving the world and raising happy families, and everyone loved them except the villains who were always soundly and embarrassingly defeated in the end. Certainly nothing that will go into the American literary canon.
But honestly? "Create a great work of literature that people will read for hundreds of years" hadn't been my goal. I wrote in order to cope with the miserable life I was going through at the time, to cheer myself up and to imagine what a better future would look like, and also to entertain my friends (who wrote similarly "cringeworthy" stuff).
And in that, I succeeded. As a bonus, I also got better at writing: how to build a consistent and interesting character, how to make a world for them to inhabit, how to string together sentences so that they didn't sound wooden and hollow, how to keep myself motivated to write more than a hundred words in one setting.
Still, even if my writing skills had crystallized when I was thirteen, the joy that I and my friends got from writing together would have been worth it all. It wasn't about "quality" according to whatever strangers on the internet defined that as.