I do sympathise, Anna! I have stories up there which make me cringe with embarrassment. I wouldn't want to rewrite them - I'd want to delete them entirely!
There are also stories - mostly long ones - which, when I look at them, make me long to edit them. Remove a lot of the over-wordiness. The POV switches, in earlier ones. The unnecessary speech and thought tags. The stilted dialogue.
But I don't. Why? Well, I don't ask for stuff to be taken down because, any time I've mentioned it, friends have told me not to. Because, as SHJ says, those awful ones are a 'historical record', in a way. A reminder of how I have grown as a writer. And - I'm sure this is true for other writers too - as soon as I mention a story which particularly makes me cringe, someone protests, "But I like that one!"
And I don't rewrite because, first, I don't want to create extra work for the Archive staff. As it's long stories I'd most want to edit, that would tie up a GE for a couple of weeks at least, time when she could be working on someone else's story. And anyway, I'd rather be expending my creative energy on something new, I guess!
So I'd let them be.
The Archive headers show the upload date, so readers can see which stories were your early work and which are more recent. And, let's face it, who thinks their first story was their best work?
(Though I always tell Pam, whenever she cringes at the thought of her first story, that I love
Getting Away From It All !
)
Wendy
