How To Fall Back in Love With Your Own Writing

On repurposing your old work and giving it new life.

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By

Kristi Keller

Something I do often is revisit my old writing. I can stay up into the wee hours scrolling through the rabbit hole of past published work whether it be on Substack, Medium, or old, cobwebbed blogs.

Each time I do it a huge wave of self-respect washes over me because I’m able to re-experience half a lifetime and all the effort I’ve invested in myself and my writing.

I’ve got pieces strewn all over the internet that have long been forgotten over the years.

Since I am diligently developing new homes for my writing, I thought it would be a fun exercise to go back through all my scattered beginnings and see which stories are worthy of new placement.

That’s when I discovered that many of them are more than worth it. They don’t deserve to be sitting at the bottom of a dust pile based on someone else’s opinions or a worthless algorithm.

I’ve had a lot to say over the years, in the form of hundreds of articles with merit. I’m worth more than just a brush-off.

So are you.

Here’s how my self-competition began

In 2019 I began dismantling an old blog to republish my work elsewhere.  Trust me, I cringed at most of the pieces I’d written. My writing style back then was way out to lunch and I wondered who the hell I was even talking to. 😂

Writing for a huge platform instead of a personal blog forced me to brush up on my skills in preparation for going toe-to-toe with thousands of other writers. 

Publishing pieces in a widely read space on the internet changes you. By plopping your material smack into the middle of the boxing ring, you quickly realize you’d better go in with gloves on and be prepared to die trying.

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So, that’s what I did. I restructured and rewrote, and studied thousands of other writers as if I were competing, both against them, and most importantly, against myself.

That’s the type of challenge we should all be setting ourselves up for because it forces improvement.

A little healthy competition can transform your work and prepare you for more noteworthy challenges in your writing career.

In my reengineering process, I realized that the bottom of the barrel is exactly where some pieces needed to live.  However, upon revisiting it, I also fell back in love with some of my older work, regardless of whether it was so low no one would ever find it again.

The important part is that I found it again. And I know it’s worth much more than the lack of love it has received.

There are pros and cons to everything we do. It’s how we learn. We try new things and either fail or succeed, but hopefully, we’re also taking comprehensive notes along the way.

Those notes become our portfolio to build on as we move in different directions. As many of us writers already know, our writing is not the sum of one destination.

If you write for your own blog that nobody reads, you’re guaranteed to find new life on a different platform. I did.

If you write for a platform and nobody happens to read it on the day you publish it, that’s not the end. Writing is portable and adaptable. Move it again. There are no rules.

Don’t allow the opinions of a select few to serve as a final judgment on your work. If you love it and feel it can serve a higher purpose, then go find that purpose.

There are billions of opinions out there, why settle for just thousands?

Thanks Kristi!

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