From both Writers Guild and my appointment with a peer tutor, I received overwhelmingly positive feedback on this piece, and it has remained relatively untouched from its first draft. Initially, I wrote this piece in the middle of one of my lectures and wanted to experiment with a total stream of consciousness style. Catching the spelling errors was the most helpful, as well as the general support and positive feedback for this piece.
I received feedback about character introduction. The majority of my consultation was focused on pronoun choice and style of my writing. Reading the piece out loud was of much help when determining what words were better for reading aloud and reading in the mind. It was a positive challenge for me to do that!
After consulting with a member of the Writing Center, I made some specific changes to the dialogue in certain scenes of the screenplay. Having someone that I knew and respected tell me my dialogue, in certain scenes, didn’t sound natural made me go back and redo a lot of my wording. I made the dialogue sound more natural and even flowing. Having another respected peer read my script and give helpful feedback made for a much better work overall.
I struggled a little with tense so Nikita [a tutor] at the Writing Center helped point me to some recourses online and also highlight areas with inconsistent tense. She also suggested writing the whole story in the present tense so it’s more engaging to the reader. I reviewed all her markups on tense and updated the main story to present tense. I kept [a few] past tense sentences just because they make more sense that way. Nikita also pointed out to me that my dialogue and thoughts could be more clear. I went through her markup and updated all thoughts to be italics and added “I thought” at the end to distinguish them.
One thing that was only lightly touched on in my original version was this concept of the North Side versus the South Side. Cats on the North Side are well off, chipped, and predominately pets while those on the South Side are nip addicts, tipped, and predominately strays. Further developing this dynamic gave rise to the inclusion of the ear-tipping and animal control within this piece as well as gave more allowance for building onto Meowington’s past that had also been lacking in my original piece.
The piece is surrealist fiction, and there is a recurring theme of the narrator character looking at people and not being able to recognize their whole face. She looks at people and “catches an eye, an upper lip, maybe a smile line, but the whole picture never comes together.” In my original ending, the narrator looks at her mother and recognizes her whole face. Someone asked me what I’d think about carrying the facial blindness through to the end rather than neatly resolving that tension. This helped me think deeply about what my point was. It’s creative fiction writing so it doesn’t have a thesis or argument in the academic sense, but I do have a core idea/theme.
I like to write concisely, in a way that usually involves judgments that sometimes only I can make. Knowing when writing like this works and when it doesn’t is the most important part of peer feedback to me.
Being told what others thought I did well was really helpful during the process as it helped me see more of areas that solicited a reaction from the audience and helped me take that information and apply it to other areas that I thought could also benefit from it. Knowing where an audience wanted more details was also beneficial, as it helped me see places where I thought an audience was intrigued by or where more information was needed to help make an impact.
Someone thought it might be better to know a little background information about the characters, so I tried to mention the types of missions the girls usually go on. People also asked what type of relationship they had (platonic/familial/romantic) but I decided to keep it vague on purpose.
People wanted to know more about the viewpoint these observations were coming from, essentially who the speaker was. Also, people suggested using the title as a way of providing more context for the reader.