A year ago

I had the realization today that I could go back and read what I had written a year ago today. I've been doing this blog for over a year, and sometimes I still nearly forget to do it. That kind of boggles my mind. They say you do something every day for thirty days and it becomes a habit, and yet here I am a year later and the only habit I've developed is barely remembering to to do it. Kinda pathetic. But barely remembering is still remembering, and that has to count for something, right?

Despite that I can now look back a year in my life and read my writing, I'm kind of afraid to. Do I really want to see how bad my writing was a year ago today? Do I really want to see what little has changed in such a long period of time?

In some instances, even just looking back at the title can be enough at times, though. A year ago today, I wrote Music on a snowy day, which in truth was a piece I had already written numerous times before that. In fact, it's a piece I'll probably rewrite numerous times moving forward in my life. It's part of a story that I desperately want to write, but that I have a hard time cementing. There's not really a bad guy involved, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's making it difficult for me to find a flow of the story. Not to mention that it has half a dozen main characters, and I've talked before about how that doesn't usually work out too well for me.

While that was one of my better pieces at the time (thanks to just how many times I had already written it), some of the others around it are pretty cringeworthy. One in particular was The boxing match. I know what I was trying to do with it, but even at the time I kind of knew that it wasn't going the way that I wanted it to. And now... It's just hard to read. I imagine that's true for anyone who read it at the time. The wording is repetitive, I hardly looked at what I was writing to see if sentences made sense or if words were where they belonged. Granted, I still don't read these over repeatedly before posting them, but I've gotten better at looking at what I'm writing as I go along just to make sure that there aren't extra words where there shouldn't be, or words missing entirely that give a phrase context so that it makes sense.

Other pieces that I distinctively remember being proud of for one reason or another now seem silly to look back on. While it is impressive to know that I can write five hundred words in under ten minutes, that's a lot of crap to be crunching into such a short period of time. When you start to move that quickly, it becomes easy to lose yourself among the mayhem of your own thoughts. I've learned that, rather than writing quickly, it is better to write smoothly. Don't hit a bump too hard and just leap over it in an attempt not to slow down. Instead, steadily push against that bump until you are past it. It doesn't matter how slow or fast you are overall. Just that you keep writing.

It doesn't feel like I've learned a lot over the past year. But maybe the things that I've learned are more subtle, and are setting themselves in place to make a bigger difference down the line. I'd certainly like to think that that's what's happening. I guess the only way to really find out is to keep going. And hopefully in another year's time, I'll look be able to look back on this and make new observations and realizations.