A photograph of a woman standing in front of a brick wall. The woman is photographed from the chest, up, and only her profile is visible. She is holding a book open, and has plonked it down on her face, hiding her face from view.
Photo by Siora Photography

This week I started peeking into my old drafts. I’d be lying if I said I was eager to start this process; I put it off until I couldn’t justify doing so any longer.

As a little morale boost, I watched a few Neil Gaiman videos before cracking open my old drafts. The one below might not be revision specific, but I find that good writing advice tends to help re-center me before diving into the process. Neil Gaiman is always a joy to listen to; take a look at a short clip of his writing advice that I got a lot out of:

I chose to start by looking over my newer drafts first. I honed in right away on a story I wrote for an English course I took at Camosun College last year. That year of distance afforded me the opportunity to return to the piece with fresh eyes.

I was going through a bit of a tumultuous time; many of my relatives were getting sick, so death, distance, and the progression of complicated relationships through life were on my mind. It was interesting to see just how much this affected the themes of the story.

A close-up photograph of a typewriter. There is a sheet of paper in the typewriter, with the text: "rewrite... edit... rewrite... edit... rewrite" in black ink.
Photo by Suzy Hazelwood

While the overall structure and message of the story still worked, I definitely paired down some redundant sentences and fiddled around with the imagery. I also caught a few embarrassing mistakes I managed to miss the first time around!

I’ve given it a few passes now, and have passed it off to a trusted reader to hear how the story lands for them, and to find out if I have missed any glaring errors. It is all too easy to miss one or two mistakes when one has re-read the same passage several times in a row!

A photograph of many novels. The novels are opened down the middle, so that text is displayed. Around 30 books are displayed. There is an orderly chaos to the layout.
Photo by Patrick Tomasso

Once this has been given the stamp of approval by my trusted reader, I am going to go ahead and add this to my “ready to submit” folder in my google drive. I’d like to aim to have 1-2 more stories in similar condition before I begin querying online publications.