Thank you so much for sharing this! I enjoyed reading the story last week, but your reflections about how to take it further are so insightful. While I’ve made outlines for short stories before, I often feel like they focus on causality but not character transformation, and I’ve never used GDS to outline a story. I’m excited to give it a try this week!
It helped tremendously! I drafted a new story this week from the outline that I made in response to your post, and while my writing group had some thoughts about how to take it deeper, they felt like the larger structure is working. I feel like this approach saved me several exploratory drafts!
I definitely prefer creating an outline first. I always get off track, though, and end up tweaking the outline to (Blake Snyder's words) straighten the spine of the story. I enjoyed Eat You Whole on first reading, even knowing that Honey's dream was doomed--that she would have a lot of heavy lifting ahead in a relationship with an alcoholic. Your suggested revisions would strengthen the story. Thanks for going through it--I learned a lot about structure from your analysis.
Thank you so much for sharing this! I enjoyed reading the story last week, but your reflections about how to take it further are so insightful. While I’ve made outlines for short stories before, I often feel like they focus on causality but not character transformation, and I’ve never used GDS to outline a story. I’m excited to give it a try this week!
Thanks for reading! I'd love to hear more about your experience with the outlining process.
It helped tremendously! I drafted a new story this week from the outline that I made in response to your post, and while my writing group had some thoughts about how to take it deeper, they felt like the larger structure is working. I feel like this approach saved me several exploratory drafts!
I definitely prefer creating an outline first. I always get off track, though, and end up tweaking the outline to (Blake Snyder's words) straighten the spine of the story. I enjoyed Eat You Whole on first reading, even knowing that Honey's dream was doomed--that she would have a lot of heavy lifting ahead in a relationship with an alcoholic. Your suggested revisions would strengthen the story. Thanks for going through it--I learned a lot about structure from your analysis.