SHORT STORY: I HAVE QUESTIONS
The revision of my short story, “I Have Questions,” was very drastic from beginning to end. Reorganizing the structure in a logical manner was a huge concern for me when revising this story. This was because I started out writing the story while being pretty unsure of what the arc of the story would be. With the first revision, I started doing this by changing the beginning to hook the reader in more. I really resonated with the suggestion to start the story when the character, Elysha, ripped the narrator’s phone away. Other than solidifying the hook, I also tried to incorporate a peer suggestion to add more dialogue between the narrator and the character, Harden. I added some dialogue that would signal the beginnings of a character development arc for Harden. However, I still had to remind myself to include narrator internal thoughts as reactions to the dialogue in order to give it meaning.
The second revision is really where all the magic happened. I was starting to get a lot of questions from reviewers detailing confusion and questions they were having while reading my story. First off, I needed to make it more clear that this story was about a sheltered new college student taking a risk and making a mistake. Then I needed to create an explicit want for the main character in order to drive the story along. I knew that the want of my main character was to be loved romantically for once in their life. Another huge issue in my story was that there wasn’t really an arc. One suggestion I got was to turn my story into three sentences. I did that, but then decided to develop that further by creating an outline of events I wanted to happen in the story. Looking back, I wish I would’ve created this outline in the beginning so I wouldn’t really have to rearrange and add so much to my story later on. Things that needed to happen for a proper arc with a high peak and resolution was there needed to be a positive beginning to the relationship, a build up to the peak (moving too fast with the I love you), an in-person meeting being the peak with heartbreak, and then a resolution that had the narrator reflecting on the situation. The in-between of these points had to be solidified with meaningful dialogue scenes. I read through the whole story out loud a few times in order to make sure things progressed in a logical manner.
The hardest part of revision was probably making sure the arc of the story was well structured. I’m so used to writing non-fiction essays or poetry that I really needed to practice with this type of writing. The suggestion to break the story’s events into sentences really helped though. It’s also hard for me to show things in stories instead of just telling. Again, I’m used to writing non-fiction essays which include all telling and minimal showing. To do this, I needed to suggest an lgbt character without shouting it out in a way that sounded thrown in just to incorporate diversity.
POETRY: INSIDER’S INTEL
Revision of poetry is, in some ways, very similar to revising an essay or short story. While revising my poem, “Insider’s Intel,” I read started by reading it out loud to myself in order to make sure everything made sense. Early in the process, this is key because saying it aloud helps you hear it. If you get caught up on a word or two, then your reader probably will as well. I like to do this even before the peer review step because it saves the peer some confusion so they can get straight down to deeper and more content-focused suggestions.
Next comes the peer review section of revision. This step is always really important to me because it helps catch issues with the poem that I may have never thought about. One comment from a peer I got on this poem was about what they thought the poem was about. They thought it was about feeling rejected constantly jobs. With that, I knew my poem definitely wasn’t clear enough. Some poems don’t need clarification; they speak for themselves or they are meant to be full of mystery. I felt like this poem needed to be more clear to get my point across. To do this, I added some more meat to the poem. What I mean by this is that I fleshed out the story by adding a climax: the broken cup. I like that this poem now has an arc that resembles the structure of short stories. The resolution of being more understanding when workers make a mistake seems more apparent to me now. The ending was too abrupt and vague in the first draft.
