I chose my second short story because I felt like it had the most potential moving forward. The content was interesting to me and I was excited to develop it into a more cohesive short story. Receiving feedback was quite interesting to me because it made me look back on the scope and genre of my story. I learned that the scope of a short story has to be isolated enough to not overwhelm the reader. The first draft of my story had a lot of things happen over a span of many years and my time jumps were larger than they probably should’ve been. So, in revision I wanted to really focus on shortening the scope of my story in order to make it fit into a shorter time frame. By doing this, I cut out the beginning parts where I was talking about everything that came before the virus itself. I cut that down to just a little bit because I felt like it would make more sense to focus more on the apocalyptic future aspect and flesh that out more. Another comment I got for revision was that the content of the story was much too close to what was happening today. I agreed with this and I wanted to make the story more fictional. So, I altered the name of the virus and the group in the story to be more vague. Finally, I also wanted to focus more on the characters and revealing things through dialogue. With the genre of literary fiction, the story should be focused on the characters themselves and their behavior that results from events around them. Looking back, I was focusing a lot on what was happening on the world itself instead of how the characters were reacting and dealing. So, I tried to change some things here and there to adopt that genre into my piece.
