Riday Dharmendra Dalal

ENGL 207

SPRING 2023

REFLECTION – REVISION CHOICES & CHALLENGES

Revising your creative writing pieces is an essential part of the process to crafting a

masterpiece. For me, this was a totally different experience as it was my first time engaging

so much into creative writing.

To start off, for my first poetry workshop, I wrote a poem called “there go my precious

memories”. Presenting it in class in front of an audience made me realize that although I

played really well with similes, metaphors and imagery, I was trying to leave a little too much

on the reader’s interpretation, a lot to an extent which the reader cannot interpret. This was

the reason I chose to exclude the line “just like Her” that I wrote towards the end of the poem

and restrict the context to just “precious memories” in general rather than memories related to

someone special. Other than that, I spaced out the line “It shattered into pieces…” as a

separate stanza to enhance its effect on the readers.

Next was one of my major writing assignments, the week 10 writing assignment. My work

was titled “It’s dinner time guys!”. At first, I wrote the entire piece in close-third person. But,

upon closer inspection and repeated reading, I realized that writing it in first person enhanced

it effect on the reader. It was more like an incident viewed directly through the third person’s

eye narrated scene by scene. Moreover, this also meant that the piece would be like a point of

view, dialogue-heavy and would have stronger scene-building. I just added more dialogues

for Priya in the piece, made the language slightly more informal to indicate that they were all

relatively young (in their 20s), and changed Priya as the “eye” in the story, i.e., the entire

story is shown from Priya’s point of view and the story progresses along with the dialogues.
Then came my short story workshop, for which I wrote a story titled “Change of Heart”.

Editing this story was especially tedious because there were a lot of things I needed to

change. Firstly, I had to fix the tenses in the piece as there were several inconsistencies which

interrupted the flow. Secondly, the pacing of the story was not regulated as it got too fast

towards the end and was too slow at the start owing to the entire descriptions I gave about the

consequences of the failed surgery and how Masdar city looked like. Thirdly, not everyone

understood the suspense towards the end of the story as I did not give emphasis on Dr. Rohan

being an orphan. I changed the story to account for the above-mentioned anomalies. I

changed the flow of the story such that it starts off somewhere in the middle, goes back to the

start, and then proceeds till the end. Also, I removed all the footnotes in the story as they

were not necessary to be included in the piece.

And lastly, there was my research project. Presenting my research as a poem was definitely

challenging. But, on the contrary, I really did well in the initial draft as I was able to include

enjambment, imagery, metaphors, and enough scene-building to set the scene. But what I did

miss out on was a little past context, i.e., more on the actual “consequences” of the war and

why the war was happening in the first place. This is why I chose to add the lines:

“Conquering the Donbas for more “opportunities”

More land, and obviously

More money: isn’t that what we all want?”

Moreover, I also added a few footnotes to give the readers extra information on certain words

/ characters.