The 11th, and second to last, chapter of One Year to a Writing Life is about rewriting. I’ll confess that due to NaNo and the impending release of Going Home, I haven’t managed to put quite as much time into the exercises as I normally do. The chapter featured a quite comprehensive list of things to look at when rewriting and editing (figurative language, setting, genre, you name it) and the exercises consisted of picking a particular work and looking over it with these things in mind.
Since I was, as mentioned, quite busy, I ended up simply reading through a piece and taking notes of things I wanted to change or take a look at in closer detail, but I didn’t actually execute those changes. I picked a short story, currently unnamed, that takes place in the same world as Going Home. I had originally planned to publish it together with Going Home as a sort of bonus, but I have since then changed my mind. Instead, I will be putting it up on my Wattpad account once it’s finished and once I have a few more short stories in that same world (I have a couple in the works already), I will publish a short story collection with them.
Anyhow, in spite of the limited time I had to spend on this, I found this chapter quite useful. The list of things to consider when rewriting was very thorough and helpful, and I can imagine I will end up referring to it once in a while in the future. And for this particular short story, I will be working on the symbolism, trying to clarify the voice, reducing some clutter and making a bunch of other little changes.
The next, last, chapter is called Writing the Way Home. I have no idea what that one will be about, and I won’t find out until after the big release date.