Blog 12: Revising my essay

Although my first essay has potential and I would like to return to it later, for this class I am going to concentrate on revising my second piece, "The Same", which is a comparative narrative about my sister and I. I chose to revise this story because I have a lot more to say and feel I have not fully developed crucial elements and ideas. The whole point of the story was to ruminate over the differences between my sister’s childhood and my own. Initially I was going to come at it from a birth order angle, but found that was both difficult and possibly ineffective. It was also difficult to “tell” Colleen’s side of the story because I am writing on pure observation. As Maureen commented on one of my blogs, I am comparing my insides to Colleen’s outsides, which can be problematic if not addressed somehow.
I think I can expand several scenes that I mention fleetingly such as making pizza with my Grandma and I want to add a scene that captures the incongruity of our home life in the present and when I was a child. I also plan to add more dialogue, but I haven’t decided where it should go. I am flirting with the idea of completely changing the structure of the story as well. After reading Stanton’s “Laundry” I was inspired to try a parallel structure that requires alternating episodes that ultimately tie into one another (my childhood + Colleen’s childhood= a shared experience.) It would be more intentional/obvious than the parallelism I have created in the first draft. I want to smooth the transition between the opening scene when I’m on the telephone with my mom and the flashback to 1987, but I’m not exactly sure what needs to be done.
It is obvious now that I have to choose one subject and hone in on it, rather than address several things at once. What is the message I want to convey here, is it guilt?love?being a role model? I don't know yet.