In the short story “There was Once” the author Margret Atwood took many risks in the writing of this story. “There was Once” has two speakers in it. The audience is not given a description of them; we are more so just thrown off into the deep end of dialogue. The story starts off with the first speaker telling the story of Cinderella. “There was once a poor girl, as beautiful ash she was good, who lived with her wicked stepmother in a house in the forest.” This is when we meet speaker two he interrupts the storyteller by asking a bunch of questions. “Forest? Forest is passe, I mean I have had it with all this wilderness stuff. It’s not a right image of our society today. Let’s have some urban for a change.” This brings us to the first change that the speaker prompts the story teller to make. The next change the speaker prompts the storyteller to make is when the storyteller is describing Cinderella as “a middle-class, girl as beautiful as she was good.” The speaker tells the storyteller to cut beautiful because we are dealing with to many intimidating physical role models. Thus leading the storyteller to revise his story to “There was once a girl who was a little overweight and whose front teeth stuck out.” We see that the storyteller has made her out to be the farthest from beautiful.

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