Over this extended winter break at home, I decided to tackle something that I had been putting off for years: organizing my Google Drive.
I remember when I first made my personal email account, I had a plethora of folders that were color-coded and every document had somewhere to go. However, as the months went by, I continued to create document after document and when it didn’t match the folders that I had previously created, I just left it out in folder limbo. Soon, I stopped putting things in folders that I knew belonged to one because of laziness. Now I had dozens upon dozens of homeless documents.
As I organized them back into where they belonged, I noticed the large number of stories that I had created, around 70. Wanting to procrastinate my stats and econ homework, I created a spreadsheet and took records of all the stories I had written on my computer. Here are the most common themes I found when going through them:
The Forgotten
As someone who’s written over 100 stories containing different characters, plots, settings, and more, I knew I was bound to forget some of the older stories. What I didn’t realize, though, was how bad my memory was. There was a story that I finished back in August of 2021 that I never remember writing, even though it was over 30 pages long. If that’s not bad enough, there was something I had written back at the beginning of 2020 that was 195 pages long, and it still took me a minute to remember a single character’s name. I’ve started to notice that once I finish something (or give up and put it in the ‘not finishing’ folder), I tend to look forward and move on to something new pretty immediately. This means that I forget about what I wrote before. In a way, it’s nice because during the periodic times where I look through these stories, I can relive the story like I’m reading it for the first time, which is a nice feeling. So it’s not all for nothing, and let’s be honest… some of those stories are meant to be forgotten.
The Repeated Names
I never noticed how often I repeated names. In fact, I thought that I was good at not repeating names in stories considering that “1000 Baby Names For Girls” and “1000 Baby Names For Boys” are on my browsing recommended page. Unfortunately, I was completely wrong. I’ve used every generic boy name in the book (Aiden, Noah, Cayden, Peter, Daniel, Nick… it goes on and on) while using the weirdest and random girl names (Finley, Laia, Maren, Amelia, to name a few). All of these names just mentioned have been in stories at least three or four times. I think this is because once I find a name that I like, I want to try and have a finished story with that name, but when I give up and move on to something different, I still like the name and want to use it. This creates a ton of the same names in my ‘not finishing’ folder, which is slightly confusing when I’m reading over them again.
The Names of People I didn’t Know
A big rule of mine I’ve had while writing was that I never wanted a character to have the same name as someone I knew well in real life. This was because I felt that I would unconsciously make a character that acted like them, which seemed too weird for me. I’ve kept up this rule well, but now that I’m in college and know more people, I’ve met people that have the same first names as some of the main characters in these stories I’ve created. It’s a little annoying because it’s difficult to actively try to think of an original character in my head when all I think of is the person in my current life instead.
Some of These Stories Are Horrible
I try not to criticize myself that much on my past writings because I recognize that I was at a different level when I was younger and it was just a feat that I was spelling words correctly, but there comes a point where I wonder, “what am I even trying to say here?” I went through a phase where I dramatized all my characters so much to the point where they were annoying me, even when they were supposed to be ‘the good guys.’ It’s like I gave everyone a depressive-emo phase and thought that was how normal people behaved (which they don’t). There are even some recent stories I can’t bring myself to read.
A Lot of These Stories Have The Same ‘Gist’
This is a nicer way of telling myself that a lot of the things I write are unoriginal or cliché. This is mostly due to the fact that I simply enjoy writing and want to type on a keyboard like I am currently doing with this article, and I don’t care how cheesy it is since no one is going to read it. Most are love stories where the guy and the girl (or the girl and girl or guy and guy) fall in love but there’s a problem and it’s solved and that’s the end.
And Despite It All, I Love Writing
The thing I noticed most while going through these old stories was how much I enjoyed looking back at them and seeing my progress. It felt like I had unlocked another part of my memory and was able to fully be immersed in my creative work again. No matter how bad or cliché or grammatically wrong the story was, I know that I loved writing it, and that’s what matters.