Angry Gable Press

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Motivation Through Collaboration with Your Past and Future Selves

By Katherine Quevedo

Once upon a time, three writers held hands like a paper doll chain. They collaborated on a story. The first one dreamed. The second one toiled to record the dream and imbue it with meaning from life experience. The third one placed the story within the context of others. They were all the same author, of past, present, and future.

This is the story of any writer who stays the course, who knows a thing or two about completing and polishing a draft and sending it out, again and again, into the world. No matter your writing approach—outlining, figuring it out as you go, a blend, or something else—I believe we each undergo a process of self-collaboration. I know, I may sound a bit like the character Sherri Ann from the comedy Best in Show, munching away on popcorn while she waits for “another message from [her]self.” But maybe she’s onto something?

Like Hansel and Gretel, our mind leaves us breadcrumb trails all the time. We may think of these paths as a train of thought, something we risk losing as our brain works constantly to filter our surroundings. Our imagination meanders down one branch, then scurries back to catch us up with the here and now. But what did it find down that series of forks? If we retrace those steps, what story awaits us? The longer we take to capture those details, the faster those ravenous birds descend upon the breadcrumbs, snapping them up with knifelike beaks. Those what-if paths vanish.

Writing helps preserve those precious thoughts. The words you lay down now—your drafts, fragments, notes, outlines—are better than breadcrumbs, because they shouldn’t get swallowed up by the time you happen upon them. They’ll lie in wait, ready to lead you back down the original path to where your subconscious left off. And that path may have grown more magnificent in the interim, or veered in a new direction. Hence, rough drafts are a gift to your future self, whether that Future You is you in an hour or a decade. Even one sentence you write now, if it’s the right one, can transform a future writing session.

When I chip away at a draft, I’m constantly writing incomplete snippets. It’s a form of commitment and trust. I’m committing words to the page (although they can change), and I’m trusting that Future Me will know what to do with them. The key here is revisiting. Focusing. Learning to draw connections, to step back, to see the whole arc, to zoom back in again and bring the piece to completion. Patience, and resolve.

For example, one of my forthcoming stories  started off as a paragraph I wrote for fun as an undergrad. At the time, I thought I had the beginning of a novel, an epic retelling of the war in heaven described in Paradise Lost, from the perspective of the angels. I did nothing with it for years. By the time I opened that file up and metaphorically blew the dust off it, I’d made a few crucial realizations in my growth as a writer:

1) I wanted to write short stories, not novels;

2) I still loved that paragraph;

3) and I understood, at long last, what it needed.

I could see how to take my initial concept and deepen it, layer in my fascination with virtual reality, and help it say something timely I wanted the world to hear. Self-collaboration initiated. (And yes, I kept that paragraph on my story’s first page, almost verbatim.)

When you’re feeling particularly stuck, when the birds have had their way with your crumbs, I recommend you daydream traveling back in time to meet a past version of yourself—when you were just starting out, when Past You would be pretty proud of how far Present You has come. I go back even before those undergrad years, to 14-year-old Katherine. She writes purely for the love of it. Aspirations are brewing inside her, sure, but they’re nowhere near the surface yet. It’ll be years before she writes the paragraph that will grow into that new virtual reality story. Want to know what does flow a lot nearer the surface, something that has since sunk farther from reach for Present Me? Youthful imagination. She’s steeped with it.

Your own version of a younger writer self deserves progress. Past You deserves to be pretty jazzed about what Present You is saying “yes” to these days. And Present You deserves to impress Past You, while opening up Future You to new opportunities. The writing work you put in today—whether drafting, editing, submitting, or other—is really a gift to your past and future selves. It’s respecting the creativity and aspirations of the younger you, not allowing them to languish. It’s building up the legacy of the older you.

Give yourself that gift. Go write, right now.

And as for our paper doll chain?

Still clasping hands, they lived immortalized in words ever after.

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AUTHOR BIO

Katherine Quevedo was born and raised near Portland, Oregon, where she works as an analyst and lives with her husband and two sons. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Rhysling Award, and her debut mini-chapbook, The Inca Weaver’s Tales, is part of the New Cosmologies series from Sword & Kettle Press. Her poems appear in Asimov’s, Old Moon Quarterly, TOWER Magazine, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Anterior Skies, Boudin by The McNeese Review, and elsewhere. When she isn’t writing, she enjoys playing old-school video games, watching movies, singing, belly dancing, and making spreadsheets. Find her at www.katherinequevedo.com.