Theme #7: Final Draft, Reflection

Sierra Williams
Theme #7 – Free Choice

Silent Moments.

This was not where she wanted to be at all. She had just seen a major thriller with her boyfriend. Kate didn’t like scary movies, even though some events that happened in her life seemed like she was living in one. Kate knew that because she was not by herself at the movies if something happened, she would have someone there to comfort her. Through out the whole movie Kate didn’t say anything, her eyes glued to the movie she wasn’t aware of anything going on except for the movie. She was so scared, it didn’t seem like she was moving. All of a sudden, Kate felt her nose starting to drip. She wasn’t sure what it was but she wiped her nose on her hand hoping it would stop, but it didn’t. She held her cell phone over her hand and the light given off allowed her to see that her nose was bleeding. She got up and ran to the bathroom, Kate’s boyfriend, got up behind her and exited the theater. He wasn’t really sure what was going on, but he was surprised to see Kate get up and move around. Kate stopped the nosebleed and came out the bathroom to meet her boyfriend. Kate concluded that the nosebleed happened because of the scary movie she was watching and she got frightened. To Kate’s boyfriend Mark, it seemed like she was always making excuses for everything but this wasn’t the case, Kate really did think the movie has something to do with this occurance. Mark decided that the night was pretty much over and he would drop Kate off, he didn’t feel like dealing with her and the bad luck that always seemed to follow Kate around. Mark dropped her off and said a short goodbye. He didn’t take much time to make sure that Kate was okay but she was fine.

As she was walking up the steps to her apartment, her foot slipped and she started to trip up the steps, but she caught herself. She threw her bag on the floor and started breathing heavily. After the door had closed, it really hit what had just happened. Kate will never forget this night. It was a rainy night, and Kate was really tired. She went to the bathroom and washed her face, and then she put on some clothes to lounge in and was relaxing upstairs with her cell phone, a book and the TV remote. She was trying to decide what to occupy herself with. Then her cell phone rang. It was a restricted number that was calling her, and Kate never answers restricted numbers. It rang twice and then stopped. Kate’s phone rang again, this time it was a number she recognized but she still was not going to answer her phone. The reason she decided not to answer it was because it was from someone who she vowed never to talk to again. Kate had many self doubts, but no one was ever going to make her feel that she should doubt herself. Kate didn’t like being attacked with words, and she knew that if she decided to pick up the phone, that is exactly what would happen and that would ruin her night…. As if it hadn’t already been ruined by the embarrassment of frustrating Mark once again.

Kate was going through all of her text messages and the last one was from her friend Sarah. She decided to text Sarah to see what she was up to. Fifteen minutes passed by and that is a long time to wait for someone to respond to a text message. Once she got a response she realized that Sarah just got off of work. Kate invited Sarah over and they ate Pizza. Sarah was glad to get a meal even though she just got off from her job at a restaurant. Kate and Sarah had a lot of catching up to do because they hadn’t hung out in a while. They talked about how there life was going and all their problems. They talked about what plans they had for the future. Kate felt glad that she wasn’t in the room with anyone that was criticizing her, or doubting what she had to offer as a person. While they were having their conversation, they both heard the doorbell ring. It was very unusual because it was two o’clock in the morning. They both got freaked out and didn’t want to answer the door because there was no reason to, and they didn’t want to know who was out there. They both thought in there heads what they wanted to do at this point. Kate and Sarah sat on the couch silent, as they waited for maybe somebody to say something. But they heard nothing come from the direction of the door. Sarah being the braver of the two girls walked up to the door but had no intentions of opening it. Clearly whoever was out there heard her footsteps and slid a letter under the door. The person that was outside of apartment complex #666 was just waiting to hear if anybody was home. Sarah picked up the letter, which looked like it had been burned at one edge and handed it to Kate.

Kate was in tears at this point; she didn’t have any idea what was going on and why somebody would be ringing her doorbell at 2 in the morning. She took the envelope in her hands looked at whom it was addressed from and was tearing it into little pieces so that it was impossible to put back together. Kate knew something Sarah didn’t, but she wasn’t about to share. Sarah was trying to comfort Kate, with what ever was going on. They didn’t say much to each other, and in those silent moments Kate knew Sarah could be trusted, someone she could tell her secrets to.

REFLECTION:

There were very minimal changes I felt like I needed to make because I had worked on them in my rough draft. The focus, content, and structure of my story were something that was well thought out in the rough draft. The style came along with that and based on my comments that, was not something that needed to be changed. The conventions were really the only thing that needed to be worked on a little.

In the area of focus there were not many changes that needed to be made, because all of my comments said that it was very focused, and that my story was consistently about the same characters, and what was happening at that time.

The content of my story was pretty in depth, and I had a lot of detail in my story. Any of the sentences that were unnecessary, I deleted. There were some sentences I combined and changed around and that was the main thing I had to do for content.

The structure of my story also stayed mostly the same because in the beginning I organized it so that as different events were happening I separated it into different paragraphs. I also got many comments that my story flowed well and that it wasn’t choppy, so this means that the structure was well thought out.

The style stayed the same because my story was suspenseful from the beginning to the end. In my opinion and the opinion of some of the people that commented, my story was strong from beginning to end, because of the suspense of the story and how detailed it was.

The conventions of the story were the main thing I improved on, because I wanted to make sure everything made sense. I edited the story and revised based off of what sounded correct when I was reading the story aloud, and what is grammatically correct.