I was just sifting through the maze that is Google Docs on my computer when I stumbled across a ghost from my past – or rather, four ghosts from my past. These ghosts, as I found out, were uncompleted articles for Quick Take that hadn’t seen the light of day for the past few weeks, if not months. Confused, I opened up the articles one by one, trying to figure out what exactly made me want to put them away in the first place. Not only did I find why I forgot about them, but I also discovered an important lesson in what to do at the beginning of the writing process.

The one factor that jumped out to me almost immediately was that there was an unbelievable amount of cringe in three of those four annoying ghosts. I couldn’t continue reading past the first couple of paragraphs in those articles without grimacing and closing the tab. There was simply too much drama, too much over-the-top exaggeration and sarcasm and cheesiness that it made it almost impossible to keep reading.

My guess is that I was painfully aware of this fact when I was originally writing these articles, too. Why was I making it cringy? Probably because I started out each story with no clear direction in mind, and kept going with it in spite of that.

These lost stories had all come very close to completion; just an extra paragraph or two would’ve brought two of them to a close. Yet, all of these stories lack a conclusion, only because I had nothing to conclude them with. I didn’t have an end goal for any of those stories I was writing, and as a result, I overinflated each issue at hand; in other words, I was trying to fake it until I made it, essentially.

With each of these articles, I slowly began to realize that whatever I was working on was just too incoherent to stay together, and eventually, one by one, all four of them ended up in the graveyard of lost ideas. Ideas that hope to be brought back to life one day, but for now, rest decaying under a pile of cringe.

One day in the future, though, they will be revived. One day, I will choose one of the stories at random and delete everything except the first paragraph. One day, I will rewrite that entire article, forcing myself to do nothing else except finish it. One day, it will be published to this very website…and it will finally have the direction and the sophistication it deserves.