'Jane And John's Reflected In Moments'

There was a lot I had to think about whilst revising “Moments.” I agreed with a lot of the feedback I received from you and others in the class. I thought about changing the names of the two main characters, as I recognized that they were unintentionally and oddly simplistic, but it seemed rather trivial when there was so much else I wanted to alter, remove, and develop. Originally, Jane and John’s relationship was not very developed, and neither were either of them alone as characters. Moreover, I had originally crafted many of the scenes so that Jane should have obviously realized John was thinking about killing himself, which I had not truly realized. Finally, the erratic timeline of the story was confusing and somewhat hard to navigate,

I added in two scenes that show Jane and John interacting earlier in their friendship. The first is the scene that takes place on their first day of freshman year, but I placed it directly after the opening scene in the cemetery. The second is the fully-fledged out scene where John puts on every pair of pants he owns which takes place during their sophomore year, but I placed it after the first time I describe Jane’s time in school on the day of John’s death. Ultimately, I think these scenes also contribute to the development of John as a funny character with an interesting perception of the world. Jane’s personality echoes his, but the focus of my work with her character went into sifting through her grief. I added a scene that takes place just after she sets the fire, which shows her thoughts and feelings about both what she has done and also John’s death. All together, I think these additions create a more holistic view of the friendship Jane and John share, and help to flushing out the reader’s understanding of Jane’s

Ultimately, I tried to create a sort of pattern. Just as before, the story starts and ends with Jane in the cemetery, about a month after John has died. Then, I split up the scenes of Jane and John interacting in freshmen, sophomore, junior, and senior year, but kept them in order. I also split up the two scenes describing Jane’s experience in school on the day of John’s death, but also kept them in order. Similarly, I split up the fire scene and the post-fire scene, but kept them in order and making sure that the fire scene fell in the middle rather climactically because it is so strong. In this way, though they are all mixed up and jump around between three mini-storylines of friendship, death, and reaction, these three narratives are presented chronologically, just separated by one another. This is an idea that is a bit difficult to explain, but I hope it is apparent in my writing and makes the story flow