When you go back and reread/rewrite a story and go OMG!!

I'm rewriting a story that I finished last year. I sort of got bored with it so I put it away. I just found it after a year. After reading it for a little bit I went "Oh my god, I can't believe I wrote like this. This is HORIBBLE!!" I was just blown away at how much my writing improved over a year.
So, has anyone else done this too?

Unfortunatly yes, with my first attempts at my current novel. They were started oh, two years ago? And frankly, they are the worst things I have ever written.

But then I took them and revamped them a lot. Now they are good =)

Though, I'm sure that in a year I'll be back and rewriting it again.

Haha, I know what you mean. If I don't try to publish this story, I will probably be back and rewriting it again.

This happens to me quite frequently. Probably because I reread my old stuff too often.

I made an audible noise when I came across this sentence:

"Zack is shy, but he’s sweet and all of our mom’s love him."

Not only is that disgustingly sappy, but I can't believe I would ever use an apostrope to make something plural! I should've taken the pencil and gouged out my eyes.

Also, feast your eyes upon this line:

“Jamie... I know that if I leave here, without some kind of commitment... you’ll leave me. You’ll find someone better, and then I’ll be alone. And I’ll die! I need this! I’m going to burst!”

And an eighth grader is supposed to be saying this!

Ah well. If we hadn't written a lot of awful things, we never would've gotten to where we are today, right?

Haha, I just pulled out my writing from like... eight years ago. OMG. It's so bad. The ending of the story ended with the characters eating hot dogs. Yup. Hot dogs.

XD

Sooooo bad. It's changed a lot. I can't believe I'm sending in for the agents now.

Agreed. I always think my writing is so good when I first write it, but then when I look back after a few months or years...wow. The vast majority of it is absolutely horrible. But that's okay. I've stopped trying to write stories for a reason.

All the time. XD One of the first stories I ever wrote seriously is from... like, seven or eight years ago, and it's atrocious. It was about the Pilgrims, but I did almost no research and made things up as I went along.

The next major project I worked on... well, it was about secret agents, okay? XD And the main character was a total Mary Sue and another of the lead characters was a 1000 year old ghost. And no one notices this. And they all decided to risk their lives and fight an evil organization for ten bucks a month and free cable. XD FREE CABLE.

This was supposed to be a dead serious story. XD

Still, it gives me some hope-- if I can improve from that point to where I am now in five years, imagine what I'll be like five years later? Looking back at my old stuff shows me that at least I've grown a little, even if my stuff still isn't great.

I still find the occasional thing that I like in my old stories, though-- that one with the secret agents had some pretty funny secondary characters, and the parts of the story that were mostly intended to be ridiculous were at least somewhat amusing. Sometimes I even find that one of my really old lame ideas could be reworked into an interesting character or subplot.

Mostly, though, I just have fun laughing and cringing at how awful I was. XD

What I find kind of funny is that when you finish the story you think it's so good, and when you go back and reread it, it's like what was I thinking.

I know how you guys feel!
There's a poem I've written from before I joined this site and it is absolutely TERRIBLE!
It's got no rhythm and the rhyming is awful!
It definitely shows how good YWS is!
Meg xoxo

The Nick Of Time.

In hindsight, IT'S HORRIBLE! D: Dozens and dozens of characters, no personality, repetitive plot... I like to imagine characters from my current story killing Nick and Co.