My senior year of high school I started writing a story I eventually titled Chances Are. I put a lot of work into planning it, but I didn’t make too much progress on the actual writing.
Then I graduated from high school, quit my job at Menards, and spent five months on a hiatus from productivity.
In those fives months, I worked on that story. I wrote. I planned. I spent time working on it every single day for months. I put more work into that story than I’d probably put into all of my writing since I started as a kid.
When I finally finished it, I was so proud. I felt so accomplished. And then I read through it and immediately started planning to rewrite it. At the time I didn’t think the writing was horrible but I knew it needed a lot of work.
I’m not sure how many times I tried to rewrite that story over the years before I finally put it to rest. It just wasn’t meant to be rewritten. It just needed to be taken for what it was: my first major writing accomplishment, packed in the archives.
Chances Are remains the longest story I’ve written and completed. Aside from a handful of mediocre short stories, I haven’t finished anything since I wrote it. I’ve done a lot of writing in that time, but I haven’t finished anything of that magnitude.
Something made me think of that story recently. And part of me started thinking…I wonder if there’s a way I could still rewrite it. Or possibly write an updated story of the characters today. But then I pushed that crazy notion aside and promptly forgot about it. Because that’s what I do with everything.
I’ve been thinking about rereading Chances Are, just to see how awful the writing really is. I opened the file today and automatically saw a number of red squiggle lines. Apparently I didn’t do a proper spell check once it was done. So I decided to run one.
Oh ye gods.
Just doing a spelling and grammar check in Word broke my brain.
And not just from Word’s asinine correction suggestions.
Am it true?
NO, Word. It am not.
I think I’ll still try to read the story. But it will take every ounce of restraint I can muster to not overhaul and make every correction I can find. A proper edit wouldn’t be a bad thing, but I’m pretty sure I would drive sporks into my eye sockets before the end of the second chapter if I allowed myself to edit as I read.
It’s 111 pages long with an 8-point font.
I might be crazy enough to try reading it.
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