Hey everyone!

 I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that it’s already November. 2025 is just two months away! 

 I’ve been a bit busier lately so writing has been slower than I would like, but I took some time recently to read over some of my old stories. And while doing so, I realized how looking back at your old stories can actually be beneficial. 

 Now I know what you’re thinking. “I don’t wanna read over my old stories! They make me cringe and want to throw it all into a dumpster and burn them!” And I know exactly how you feel. But there can be good things that come from going through your old stories, no matter how much they make you want to sink into the floor. 

 Be proud of your progress 

 This is one of the biggest reasons to go back and read your old stories. You may cringe when you read them, but that just means you’ve improved massively since you started. Look at how smoothly your dialogue reads compared to before. Look at how your descriptions actually make sense now. Look at how your characters aren’t the most overpowered people in existence anymore. Obviously, there’s still things we can all learn when it comes to writing, but sometimes it’s nice to look back and see how far you’ve come since you started. It can be a good way to remember just how much you loved to write, and why exactly it is that you’ve kept on writing. 

 Learn from your mistakes 

 This is closely tied with the first point, but when you go through your old writing, you might see something that you wrote that makes you cringe, only for you to realize that you still do it now. I used to throw in an absurd amount of parenthesis when I wrote, and I only noticed that once I went back and read over some of my old stories, because my goodness. I used parenthesis almost every paragraph. And looking at the story I was writing then, I was embarrassed to realize that I was still using way too many parenthesis. So I decided to try and use less parenthesis when I wrote and my writing has definitely improved in quality since then. (It’s still not perfect, obviously, and I still use parenthesis from time to time. I just learned something from my old stories that I used to improve my writing.) So when you go back and read your old stories, find out what exactly it is that makes you cringe. You might find that it still occasionally appears in your current writing, and learning from it may save you from even more cringing later on. 

 Reuse ideas

 On a rare occasion, you may look back on your old stories and remember a character or a particular plot line or some unique aspect of a world that you have fond memories of. Old stories are a great place to find ideas to reuse in a much less cringe, actually writable story. Maybe it’s that one character that you fell in love with that actually has potential for their own story. Maybe it’s a line that you found buried in that one old story that actually hits really hard. Maybe it’s that one cool section of your world that you loved and are still hoping to include in a story someday. Take those and rewrite them— remember why you loved them and enjoy writing them in a story that doesn’t make you want to lock it in a box and hurtle it into the deepest part of the ocean. 

 So there it is! Sometimes it’s good to read your old writing, no matter how much you cringe even thinking about them. Is there an old story of yours that you feel like reading over (and maybe even rewriting)? Go do it! 

 Thanks for reading! – Em