December 9th, 2022
Quite a few major revisions took place as I worked through the final draft of my story. The first and most major component that I changed was the perspective from which the story was told from. In my rough draft, I originally had the story told in third person, but after the in-class workshop, I realized that the main focus of the story was actually Sophia. So, I went through the whole story and changed it to be told from the first-person perspective of Sophia. This allowed me to make the story more personal, and to curate those feelings that Sophia felt for the reader, too. I wanted to make her more relatable, and changing the story to first-person allowed me to do that. Putting the story in first-person also allowed me to address the issue that people had in the workshop about not knowing about Noah and how he felt. The truth is, I really didn’t want them to know, because Sophia didn’t. But after the workshop I realized that they expected more about Noah because the voice was in third person, and should have been omniscient. So, putting it in first-person allowed Soph to tell her story in retrospect, and only hers. She doesn’t get the answers, so the reader doesn’t either.
Another major revision I made to this story was focusing more on the theme of outer space to make the story have more lyrical components. I had glimpses here and there of focusing on the metaphor in my original draft, but I hadn’t solidified the idea yet. So, I went through the draft and made a point to emphasize the longboarding scene where Noah points out the stores more prominently. After I emphasized and spent some time on this scene, I then started sprinkling the outer space comparisons throughout the story, ultimately creating Noah and Soph’s space. Hence the name change from Wrong Person, Right Time in the rough draft, to OU(te)R SPACE in the final draft. This is clear throughout my story if you read it, and I think it really drove the feeling home that I was trying to describe.
One minor, but still important, revision that I made was adding some more context about Asher to the story. I actually started the story at an entirely different time than I originally had in the rough draft. Instead of Sophia still being in her relationship with Asher, I started the story with it being Sophia’s first summer without him. This was the summer between senior year graduation and freshman year of college, a really weird, in-between space that doesn’t quite feel real. I think that set up the tone of Noah and Soph’s story really well. I described the tension that always existed between Soph, Ash, and Noah and then moved into Noah and Sophia’s story. I liked the way that felt much better than the original draft. I also didn’t want the reader to know everyone about Ash, because I didn’t really want them to feel super comfortable with how the story ends with her being happy with Asher. That is why I had her describe herself as a “hopeless romantic” in the beginning of the story when she was describing her and Ash’s past and then repeated that description of herself in the end, once again when describing her new, ‘happier’ relationship with Ash.
Some other minor edits I made were adding more dialogue between Noah and Sophia and cutting some of the description down a bit. I have always been a very descriptive writer, and find it more difficult to write concise dialogue that shows more than tells. Another super minor thing I changed was my timestamps, or pauses or whatever you call them. The little stars in the middle of the page that separates the allows a breath between two separate scenes, that thing. I changed them to instead of just simple asterisks to a moon with stars surrounding it, since it added to the spacey feeling of the story. The last one ends with a start that’s blackened out, almost to signify the end of the story, the blinking out of their past. [696 words]
