Faron Samford

12/9/09

Revising Breaking Point

                When I sat down to start writing a five to ten page work of fiction, I was a little intimidated.  I participated in some creative writing exercises in English classes in high school based off of a prompt, but had never actually sat down to write a piece of fiction starting with a blank page.  I took a suggestion from our reading assignments and chose to take a personal experience and make a few changes to the story to turn it into a work of fiction. The class workshop of my piece gave me confidence to hear people say that they really liked certain elements. The experience and suggestions from the workshop have given me numerous areas to change the story to the point that every time I read through it, I wind up making some kind of change.

                I decided to initially start my revisions with the suggestions that I remembered from the class workshop, without referring to the notes that were given to me. The biggest overall suggestion that I received in-class was to change the ending of the story. I had included a paragraph at the end that came off as more of an afterthought and took the overwhelming suggestion to eliminate that paragraph completely and let the story have the more powerful image of something “unraveling” between the couple in the end.  I agreed that this made the ending more powerful, but chose to save the paragraph for if I choose to develop more of the story and let this stand as a chapter.  Another suggestion that was made in-class was to clarify the relationships between the characters a little more by giving the main character a name.  Veronica made a good suggestion in the written notes to change one of the female characters names because they both started with an “A” for added clarity. 

                Turning to the written notes, I took several suggestions from Alicia on rewording some of the sentences and improving upon some of the adjectives that I had used initially to remove repetition and make the wording pop a little more. Niki, Tara, and Jeff all made suggestions of adding an anecdote concerning the brother in the funeral scene to make the main character a little more sympathetic in this scene, which I’ve added. Jeff had also suggested that I try to create a little more sympathy for Anna, but given the situation that was being played out and her role in it, I chose to leave her as more of an unsympathetic character.  I noticed that each change that I made gave me more confidence with the story and led to other changes, like the addition of more dialogue between the main character and his friend David. I also reworked the funeral scene because the pronouns were a little confusing, but adding names seemed to help clarify a scene that I thought was powerful and didn’t want to change much.

                The experience has given me quite a bit of confidence in my writing abilities. Going through the revision process, I’ve made several notes of events that could happen prior to this story, as well as where things could be leading in the future for the couple and am trying to put together a timeline to expand it a longer short story, and possibly a novel at some point in the future.  If this does indeed reach fulfillment, I know that the manuscript as it appears now will resemble what appears in the final work, but will be expanded considerably to add to the depth of the characters in the scene.