It isn't always good, either.
Picture it. Nashville, 2018. (Sorry, just channeled my inner Sophia Patrillo for a minute.) An author ponders her next project and can't shake a story written several years, like a decade, earlier. The story just lingers there in the back of her mind. It weaves and glimmers around sassy and classy characters in a world that holds her soul. She pulls the old manuscript out thinking this could be her easiest project ever. It's 55.000 words already. Easy. Right? Wrong! It's about 10,000 words of fabulous and 45,000 words of absolute crap. She bangs her head on her computer keyboard in frustration and disappointment in her own pathetic wordsmithing.
The keyboard survives the unprompted attack.
The author's ego bears a few bumps and bruises.
She angrily deletes the piece of pathetic overuse of formal dialogue and gives up on the whole stupid thing. No, no she doesn't. The story and characters lingered with her for a decade for a reason. It was a good story. It was just badly told. It had things it didn't need and was missing things it desperately needed. The prescription was major reconstructive surgery. But, like many a Hollywood starlet, it went through a painful procedure of cutting and stitching to emerge anew. And the author fell in love all over again.
So, what happened over that decade to make that author see the flaws, and see them for the glaring ones they really were, that she was blind to before? Time, maturity, writing, and reading. All of those things together. Without one, the recipe would be a failure and so would the story. She read. And wrote. And read some more. And wrote some more. Over and over again as time passed and life happened.
Stephen King doesn't mince words about much of anything, especially writing. He said, "You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so." I'm a teacher and I talk to my students about using mentor texts to help them master writer's craft. It's what I do with so many things I read. I devour the turn of a phrase and the weaving of emotion on the page. If you're going to write, you have to read. Like Mark Twain supposedly said, "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them." Books are the world's greatest mentor texts. Don't pass up that treasure trove of writing training that is sitting there free on your library shelves. Read for the fabulous stories, but also look at how they were written. Read like a writer.
Just because something you wrote ages ago isn't great, it doesn't make it a lost cause. You wrote it because you had a story to tell. Find the story in the crap. Find the masterpiece in the chunk of rock. Carve it out and polish the stone. Just because you've grown a lot as a writer, you don't have to abandon those beautiful ideas you had when your passion was fresh and new. Take what you've learned from the books you love to read and put your own artistic flair into it. You can do this. Really. You can.