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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!

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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.

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