Revision Narrative Essay #2: Things Left Unsaid/No More
One of my biggest takeaways from the feedback process for Things Left Unsaid was that
my classmates wanted to know more about the character aside from the trauma they experienced.
So I decided that for the rewrite, I wanted to give the character more interiority, so the audience
could read their thoughts directly rather than interpret them from what the character chose to say
(or leave out of) their narrative.
I then decided I wanted to focus on something I didn’t directly experience, but was more
based in my own fears of my future. I was tired of revisiting the movie theater incident—
actually, more than tired, because it was starting to infect my nightmares again. I wanted to focus
on pregnancy and miscarriage because it’s something I think about a lot, particularly because I
have extenuating health problems that make it difficult to know if I’ll ever be able to biologically
have children. My chronic tension with pregnancy isn’t that I don’t know if it’s viable for me—
who knows if I want kids or not—it’s that I don’t know if I’ll have any choice in the matter. Zoe
Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town also partially inspired my plot, particularly because
it’s also centered around her anxiety with pregnancy.
I thought that this narrator, simply named Steph at the end, would be the most fitting for
this scenario because she seems to have several chronic tensions throughout the story, including
her relationship with alcohol, pregnancy, her boyfriend and her career/life trajectories. She has so
much stacked against her that the main chronic tension (should she discuss this with her family at
this given time) seems all the more serious.
My main source of inspiration for my rewrite’s narrative structure was Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie’s The Narrative Embassy, because I enjoyed the idea of making my narrative less
linear and more circular than it previously was. Like Adichie, I also wanted to have non-
sequiturs throughout the story (beyond the numerous movie references I included in the first
draft) —I wanted these asides to inform the audience more about the protagonist rather than
serve as comedic relief.
I am slightly concerned about how the tenses switch from scene to scene within this
story, but I also found it easier to discern what was going on than in my story’s previous draft,
which was confusing because both narratives were in the present tense.