Day 3: Sifting through your roots.

I've always been writing. Since 1st or 2nd grade when I wrote a little story for class about a star. I wish I still had that. What I do still have are floppy disks. I counted: there are 16 floppy disks that I used up until freshmen year of college via a USB floppy disk drive. That I just found. And am currently utilizing.

It's a funny thing, old technology. when I powered it up, it whirred like the stone age was coming back to life--or at the very least, dial-up internet. the floppy disks are red, yellow, orange, blue, and green. I numbered them and labeled them using tan masking tape and bullet points with what each contained. Some of the stories are familiar looking, some are not. Some I'm already cringing at the thought of reading it, but my curiosity will always win out--these are my roots. Some of my stories now are based off of these very scatter-brained writings of a teenager. I had no grammar sense, and no idea how to make paragraphs. But for how bad that is, there's something pretty golden about the rawness--I wasn't hemmed in by adult worries of planning a story or worrying about character development or any one thing. I just wrote. And wrote. And wrote. I have on average about 100 document currently some containing one paragraph, some over 100 pages long--only about 6 of them are actual stories I work on. These floppy disks contain about 60 stories, so I guess I've always been ambitious. Or really bad at planning story arcs. The point is I was writing and I didn't care if I was good at the time, I just couldn't not write. And I still feel that way, but I worry more about it (not a bad thing). The old stories might not be fun to look at, might be messy and incoherent and downright embarrassing, but they are sort of like my roots--and there are still some stellar lines hidden among the rabble. I'm glad I got them out and started sifting through them--I just might learn something from my teenaged-self.