“I used feedback to sharpen the opening and clarify the setting. The story became clearer, more emotional, and complete.”
Category: Fiction
“I received helpful feedback from the Writing Center. I revised for style consistency, clarity, and less word repetition.”
Feedback taught me to balance poetic tone with clarity and craft sharper endings for a stronger thematic conclusion.
The feedback helped me imagine different endings, and how the subtlety of one line can drastically change what the reader takes away from the experience.
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.