I spent a couple hours last night, and a few more this morning, thumbing through old notebooks and journals. I doubt anyone who writes can resist an occasional glance back at accumulated material; I can’t. The catch is, three things can happen when you do, and only one of them is good.
Getting the bad ones out of the way:
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You find stuff so bad you don’t want to admit it’s your own. “Me? Write that crap? No, I couldn’t have. Must have copied it out as an example of what not to do….” Yet there it is, and your deep dark perversely honest inner self says, “Yup. It’s yours.”
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While that is vexing, or embarrassing, it’s less frustrating than this: you find stuff whose provenance remains a mystery. There are two sub-categories here.
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One, it’s good, but you’re not sure whether you wrote it, or copied it and neglected to cite the source. Result: you have a good piece you’d like to tell someone about, but you can’t be absolutely positively confident you wrote it yourself. (If you’ve not written a lot of different stuff, or if you have a strong clear style from which you never stray, you might not believe this.)
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Two, it’s good, and you know you didn’t write it, but you’ve no idea who did, or how to track it down.
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And the one good possibility? It does happen, though not as often as you’d like, that you find stuff so good you actually smile, or sigh, or otherwise tell yourself that, even had someone else written it, you’d have to say it was good.
