When looking back through old work, it’s normal to cringe at yourself. But what was the time where your work was at its absolute worse? That one phase where you just cant reread it? Mine has to be a few years back, when I’d play thesaurus on every single word. What’s yours??
Mine would have to be "The Elves of Kyala Valley", a story I wrote in 8th grade and mercifully never finished. It had every fantasy trope known to man and the main character was the most Mary-Sue ish Mary-Sue that ever Mary-Sued. Plus, whenever a problem arose, someone would just use magic and fix it. Ugh.
I used to write a lot of stories for-profit involving "intimate relations" shall we say... Not in every story, but wayyyyyyyyy more than I care to admit, I used to write at the conclusion of their union, "and then he withdrew as she heard the inevitable audible 'plop"..." Really? I am 46 years old and have had my fair share of amicable domestic relations shall we say, and never ONCE heard that, much less the "inevitable audible plop." I just laugh about it now... (Note: certain phrases were written as such in respect to our younger readers)
Usually for me it is falling asleep! I do not feel too bad though, last night a friend of mine (female) was talking to me on the phone, and fell asleep!
This thread makes me feel uncomfortable. Back in school, creative nonfiction...oh boy. Just no. I should not have been talking about everything that I talked about. I pretty much like to pretend college never happened to me in general and that includes my writing.
Taking a trip back on the way back machine (figuratively speaking), to what I wrote at 17-18. Young me couldn't write jack without screwing everything up. So don't write like younger me anymore, also got rid of some very bad habits of making things too drawn out that it felt more like list reading than actually story progression.
When I was at the DLIFLC studying Russian, I came across Larry Niven's The Integral Trees and its follow-up, The Smoke Ring. For plot reasons, both books are sprinkled with Russian words because technology that is now ancient within the narrative of the books answers to Russian verbal commands. This led me down the utterly fallacious "If Larry Niven can do it, then so can I..." rabbit hole.
Current phase. It’s like there’s an invisible barrier with me on one side and good writing on the other. I can see it — I can recognise good writing in others' work — but I can’t reach it.
Probably my early fanfic phase. Not that I only wrote fanfiction, it was just the worst period. I wrote a bit of emo teenage cringe, but the truly worst things I ever wrote were my emo poems. Truly cannot go back to those. At least my emo cringe stories had merit in some of their ideas. The poetry? Gar...BAGE. Oh, though I did write a puppet show about the black plague about that time. Still proud.
Mine, it was and still, when writing an article about a subject in two different languages. It's extremely hard to write about the same subject in two different languages. Because of every language is associated with different ways of thinking. When writing about a subject in one language for the first time, regardless of whether the language I write with is the native language or not, ideas and words come to the mind naturally. However, when writing about the same subject in the second language, even though the language I write with is the native language for instance, words don't come naturally for the same ideas. Instead new words for new ideas come, which makes it difficult to write about the same topic in two different languages to me.
Everything I wrote in grade school was pretty bad, but I think the worst was that transition point between high school and college. At least I finished a bunch of short stories, that was the good part, but I had this weird obsession with the MC ironically dying at the end of the story. I thought it was really edgy and poignant (wow, I believe that's the first time I ever used that word). And they were extremely melodramatic to boot. But then I believe we have to go through the bad phases, and that they're vitally important.