Go back and read your old stuff: Guess what—you ain’t bad!

Dog bites man: Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark has some more good writing advice.

Try this exercise: Go back and find a story you wrote three months or three years ago. The older the piece, the “colder” it will feel to you, enabling you to read it more objectively. Ask yourself these questions: What pleases me? What would I now change? How would I describe the voice of this writer? What important lessons about writing have I learned since?

That’s a spoiler. It’s a tag at the end of this piece, in which Clark goes back and reads a profile he wrote of Lauren Bacall in 1979 for the St. Petersburg Times, which is now called the Tampa Bay Times.

Clark’s point is that if you go back and read your old stories, you’re probably going to cringe at some things, or at least notice a few things you might have done differently. What that means is that you must have learned something since you wrote that story. You’re getting smarter, better.

It’s a confidence boost, Clark says:

I know there are writers who never read their old stories. The reluctance, I believe, stems from the impostor syndrome, that all of their insufficiencies and fallibilities will surface in the re-reading. They will look at their old stories the way I look at videos of my golf swing and opine, “Man, I really do suck.”

When I go back to look at an old story, my response is usually different. I may cringe at this phrase or wish I had revised that, but my overwhelming impression goes something like this: “Hmm. This stuff is pretty good. The kid can write.”

The advice is similar to a tip I once heard when I was advising Student Life, the student newspapaer at Washington University at St. Louis. I’m afraid I can’t remember exactly who offered it, but he was an alum of the paper who had become a successful writer for a prominent newspaper. A student journalist had asked him how he dealt with writer’s block, or maybe just self-doubt. I’ll just have to quote him as best as I can from memory, but I’m positive I’m conveying his meaning correctly:

“Go back and read your own stuff,” he said. “Remind yourself that you’re pretty good. You can do this.”