Peter Becnel

A Major Transformation

I wrote Neon Lights the Butcher's Blade specifically for the assignment. I read a news story about an event that happened in America, and I thought that it would make excellent material for a climax in a work of fiction. The story goes like this—a woman goes into a local retail store, picks up the intercom and tells all of the customers that she has won the lottery and is sending them on a shopping spree. The customers believe her and are excited about their free access to various retail products, however, it is discovered that the woman is mentally unstable, and that the shopping spree is not going to happen. Rather than accept the fact that the woman was mad, and that they were not going to get any free merchandise the people rioted, looting the store. Obviously the basic story has gone through a major “transformation” in order to serve my purpose in the work of fiction that I rewrote.

Faithfulness to this as the major climactic element of my work was the greatest obstacle I had to overcome in creating my piece. I knew what I wanted to say, but forming the piece so that the elements functioned as a whole to accomplish my goal seemed impossible. With my first version of Neon I simply solve this problem by avoiding it. This is not a satisfactory solution to the issue that I faced, a fact that is adamantly revealed to me through my workshop experience. My original version of Neon was intended to be the beginning of a larger work, and it fails at this goal. The specific reason that it fails is that I am not going anywhere with it. When I was asked what I would like to write about in my final exam on the last day of class I answered, “I'm not sure yet, but I would like to write about climax.” Climax is perhaps the thing that I learned most about, in constructing a working story. I believe that the fatal flaw of my original piece was that I was not intending to go anywhere with the story, quite the contrary, I had convinced myself that I was simply writing the beginning of something much longer, and that I could not even begin to take sight of the climax. The effect is the sort of story that peters out (pardon the pun).

One specific thing that I learned from workshop (it was a conclusion the class and Dr. White reached nearly unanimously) was that my main character was presented as too romantic. After looking at my original piece and considering the implications of a man walking out of a car, the reader seeing him for the first time, and my description of him as having broad shoulders and a slim waist and a walk with an athletes ease, even I cringe a little bit. Chalk it up to inexperience; this is one of the great things about writing workshop, a major glaring flaw was detected in my piece and I realized that I needed to rework the notion of character presentation and description of physical features. Another major issue with the piece identified through revision accounts was my tendency to constantly bombard the character Mike Steele with fat-related adjectives.

As my intention with Adam, the main character was not to present him as a figure of a romance; my goal in describing Mike Steele as fat was not to make fun of fat people. My goal was to give my characters physical characteristics that matched traits of their personalities. My original draft is unsuccessful in meeting these goals because the exposition immediately draws specific attention to these characteristics, as if they are of the highest priority. The three biggest problems with my original short story Neon are that the characters become caricatures through the my reckless descriptions, the plot doesn't go anywhere, and there is little to no exposition. Another major, glaring, careless mistake that I make in my first draft is the hideous name of the grocery store. Not only is the name “Beef City” awkward and ugly, but it also does not seem appropriate for a grocery store (another detail pointed out to my attention in workshop).

I initially tried to remedy the problems in the first draft of Neon through revision, but soon found that it was impossible. The fatal flaw being, that the story was specifically written to go nowhere, and that I did not have a destination for the story in mind when I wrote it. The entire plot structure is boring; and mostly consists people walking around for eleven pages gesturing. The text as a whole did not function.

My final draft of Neon Lights the Butcher's blade is not complete, and it still requires revision. Particularly to fix the poor formating in the later portions (in exchanges involving the dialog and the narration), and an imbalance between narrative and dialog toward the story's conclusion. The opening portion, which takes place in the past, is the strongest portion of the new story. It is the portion of the rewrite that I revised the most. I also found an inventive and interesting way to transition from the past to the present. One of the greatest flaws of the new version of my story is that it ends too abruptly. In future rewrites I will continue consolidating and condensing text throughout the middle of the story, so that I can add exposition without making the piece longer.

The most important feature of the new version of Neon Lights the Butcher's blade is that it is something that I can work with. Though it is not a completely satisfactory manuscript, the most important part of my new version of Neon Lights the Butcher's Blade is that the subject matter is an appropriate length to meet the requirement. I think that it is a short story that should be told in around ten pages. Also the current version of my story is something that I can revise to improve. Unlike my first attempt at a story, the new version is not so fatally flawed as to be unable to withstand revisions.