Writing Prompt (& Process): Revisiting, Revising, Reviving

unearth writing treasures of the past...

[Author’s Note: Ahead of reading this, make sure you’ve reviewed: My Writing Habits & Processes: The Power of Prompts, as this will be building-upon a big idea shared here.]

For those of you who have been writing for awhile, who have been in writing workshops or writing groups that have included prompts and generative writing, who’ve taken creative writing classes, who have done creative (and even personal) journaling, and who have any creative work to look back upon, this writing prompt is for you.

The reason I set-up this Substack was two-fold: it is a means to explore sharing work on the website I launched (a long and wanzy road) ahead of the novel I’m working on and it was to give a home to older writing or for stories I am not planning on submitting to literary journals. In order to do this particular Substack well, I had to identify work and stories that had been written, so my time working on my novel wasn’t fully consumed by generating new content. As I talk about in The Power of Prompts, I have been in a weekly writing group for over year and have been in ongoing generative writing spaces so much so that I started reviewing and cataloguing both the prompts and the prompt responses, identifying what needed to be worked on more, what might be worthy to be submitted, and what I might hold on to for a Substack. Several micro-stories have and will be featured on Substack that were born from these recent writing spaces.

But I challenged myself to go back further. I assigned myself a task in the form of a writing prompt: revisit your old work, revise it where needed, and revive it to be shared with others. For myself, I had work dating back middle school on FanFiction.net (which is not on here lol), some pieces from high school (like one-act play The Desk), plenty of college pieces (including the first episode of Misadventures in Adulting, To Learn the Truth, Beneath the Surface, and more to come), and post-collegiate writings from my Oakland days, many of those longer form stories are being saved for a short story collection or are being submitted for competitions. But this task has included reviewing over old files, cataloguing pieces into where they might live (some to remain hidden away, a few making their way to Substack, a couple being considered for competition) however, I pulled out physical files I still have of even older pieces, of some fan fiction, of some class assignments, and am delving into past works, old characters, silly writing habits, and it’s refreshing to see the writer I was and the storyteller I evolved into. There have even been a few pieces that surprised me, several that made my laughter, with more than one that yielded a cringe – but it has been helpful to not only review prompt responses, to revisit old iterations of novels, of writing projects, of fan fiction ideations and to see how these ideas morphed into their next iteration.

So the writing prompt here is to do the deep dive! Unearth your old writing nuggets, not just a story or two from a year ago, but go back as far as you can and revisit, revise, revive. Pick one piece that intrigues you and review it. Lean into revising if that calls to you. Review it and write out what intrigues and interests you about it. Even write a reaction to it or explore a character in this piece and examine a new story for them to live. Don’t throw away the work you have in the past—consider what treasure await within them.