An awful ailment struck me, dear reader: I no longer view my old stories with disgust.
For you well-adjusted, non-artistic types, this development sounds like good news. More than good news, this bout of self-confidence should be the norm, right? As with most things, though, what’s standard for even-keeled folk is counterintuitive for artists. There are so. many. writing. advice. articles. about how it’s okay, and normal, and even good to be embarrassed by your old writing. If you see flaws in your story that you couldn’t see when you first put those words into the world, that means you’re wiser and more skilled now, right? That’s what all those links I posted say.
So if I still like my past creations, does that mean I’ve stagnated as an artist?
My old works are far from perfect. I deleted the majority of my blog posts from my first time on WordPress, and I’m too scared to read even the survivors. Time makes a fool of all political analysis, so the articles I wrote for The Borgen Project (both their website and their magazine), despite the professional sheen, are outdated in ways beyond their factoids. I’m happy I did those projects, and I stand by the good qualities they have. That said, I’ll never reread them with joy.
My first paid fiction gig, however, meant so much to me that I took screenshots of its content and posted them on my website, to prevent the story from disappearing with its now-defunct host. It’s called FTL: Flying Through Lifetimes. That link will give you all the project details, but in brief: a startup asked me to write what was basically FTL: Faster Than Light fanfiction in Twitter tweets. Those tweets got sent at predetermined hours of the day from my characters’ Twitter accounts. The original tweets disappeared with the company, but my compilation of screenshots from the backend tells this story in its easiest-to-digest format. If you read this adventure, though, don’t gloss over each tweet’s timestamp, the hours between communications, or the replies (PROTIP: if a quote’s in a grey box, then the message below the quote is a response to that line). So what does it say about me if I have a good time when I reread a messy, cheesy, and incomplete sci-fi epic I made eight years ago?
Well, all those adjectives give it away I suppose… FTL: Flying Through Lifetimes has flaws. Plenty of them! On the whole, this story’s too big in scope, and too detail-oriented, to work on a format designed to replicate modern-day characters gossiping on social media. Even though I did zero lore research before writing my own thing (the editors loved the end result, sorry not sorry), the story assumes familiarity with the game’s look and mechanics, which is alienating if you haven’t played the original in years. Because each character posts on Twitter like they would talk into a communication device, their dialogue lacks the intonations and inflections that would make their words cool, relatable, or even sensible at times. It’s also unclear when characters are saying something under their breath, and who overhears what. My old self would write weird character quirks and introduce them without context, assuming that if I did so early enough in a story that readers would just roll with them (to 2018 Nick, I say this: that technique doesn’t work. Also, buy stock in hand sanitizer). Conclusion: there’s cringe in them there hills.
So yeah, these are some of the reasons why I neglect to include this sci-fi epic in my byline sometimes. But FTL:FTL‘s flaws are often baked into the parts that cheer me, even enthrall me, on revisits. The wild tone shifts are spaced out far enough to keep the read engaging, and to give the story a rich emotional landscape. Comedy and horror arrive at just the right moments to shake things up. While character voices are awkward, they’re also strong— Alinsa, Ferry125, Norwyn, and WaiShing somehow leap past my artistic limitations and become alive. A Twitter-based story written in the style of a radio drama meant I also got to have fUn WiTh LeTtEr CaSe! The encounters and dilemmas the characters experience evoke the original game’s spirit, despite my lack of research (and even that lore ignorance works with the story’s conceit, once it’s revealed).
That, in short, is the miracle: I have something from eight years ago that I think is good, despite its problems. But what do I do with this miracle? Besides appreciate it, that is. Leave it to writers to feel bad about feeling confident I guess. In all seriousness, here are my takeaways from this revelation:
- Writing with feeling does make a difference. GenAI is a threat to the economic support for writers (what little there remains), but machines don’t have a monopoly on copying the works of your superiors without emotion. Hack writers made disposable products way before computers chatted a Gazallion Pages of Trifle. I had a lot of big, swinging, borderline unhinged emotions when I wrote this story. Those passions will never be as intense when put on the page, but the echoes of those feelings still resonate for me years later, as they will for you.
- The person I was eight years ago feels totally different from who I am now… or so I thought until my most recent reread of FTL:FTL. Most of my anxieties are tied up in issues few humans will ever be free of: the simultaneous desire and fear of change; the commitment to self-improvement; the difficulty in knowing your own soul, much less anyone else’s; and so on. Going by this story, my interests and philosophies have refined over the years, but the core elements remain.
- The most important takeaway is this: it’s possible to learn positive things from your old work too. Rereading my portfolio isn’t all about discovering ways I unknowingly erred— it’s also about discovering ways I unknowingly did something right. With all the knowledge I accumulated since 2018, I’ve learned how to intentionally repeat the good parts of FTL:FTL in future works.
I’ve reduced what I share online over the years because I wanted to only showcase things I knew were great. That trend will mostly remain, as I’ve sold enough of my work to hesitate giving it away for free. But I won’t worry about posting “flawed” things on this blog, because no one, not even myself, will know what those flaws are until many years later. And many years after many years later, there will be different “flaws” present to embarrass me!
You’ll see this site fill up with more posts this year, now that I’m less self-conscious about my old writing. And to my future self rereading this post, I have this to say: if I haven’t given you an embarrassment of embarrassments in my portfolio by this point, neither of us have been doing our job.
