Short Stories--My Guilty Pleasure

     Psst!  You wanna know a secret?

     I am a secret short story writer.

    OK, a sort of secret short story writer. I have stories in two YA anthologies, SUCH A PRETTY FACE: Stories About Beauty and THING I'LL NEVER SAY: Stories About Our Secret Selves, both edited by Ann Angel.


















    I grew up writing short stories. After all, what were our school readers but a bunch of short stories?  A five page short story was a doable proposition for an eight-year-old.  Writing a whole book?  That was for grown-ups.  (Sometimes I still think that I am not "grown-up" enough to write a novel!)

   Short stories were everywhere when I was a kid. My mom's magazines....Ladies Home Journal, Redbook, McCall's, Good Housekeeping...balanced out the recipes and housekeeping tips with short stories, two or three every issue. My own subscriptions to Seventeen, Teen and American Girl (a Girl Scout publication, not the doll people) not only had short stories, but story contests for their readers. In high school, I was a prize winner in both American Girl and Seventeen contests. While the prize money was cool, the real prize was publication in a national magazine.

First publicity photo, age 15, taken by my dad.

   I continued writing short stories as a young adult, but the market had dried up.  Those women's magazines had either gone out of business or stopped publishing fiction. The short story writers I admired published in "literary" magazines.  So I embarked on the "literary road" to publishing.

    It's a tough road.

   First rule of the pre-published author:  Know thy market. To educate myself, I read tons of digests, journals and reviews with names like Glimmer Train and Monkeybicycle. I discovered that if novels are a journey, short stories are an epiphany, a moment of time.

   Second rule:  Pay attention to rule number one. I learned that literary magazines don't like child protagonists, which puzzled me. I thought I was writing about childhood from an adult perspective like Kaye Gibbons' Ellen Foster or To Kill a Mockingbird.  I didn't write about adults because I just didn't find them interesting.  I was a school librarian, and spent roughly 75% of my day with kids whose lives were endlessly fascinating to me. Just not to acquiring editors. I went on writing about children anyway.

   Third rule:  Get used to rejection. These were the rejection slip years.  Literally, slips of paper with the phrase "does not meet our current needs" paper clipped to my manuscript. (Literary digests/journals/reviews run on a shoestring budget.) All this rejection arrived in my mailbox in a self addressed stamped envelope. When I pulled out those manila envelopes with my handwriting on it, it felt as if I was rejecting myself. Weird.

  Fourth rule: Always read your form rejection slips. You never know when some kind soul might add a personal note of encouragement. Thanks to a Post-it note on yet another returning story, I discovered my writing path.  "You write well about children" said the anonymous note, "but we don't publish stories about children.  Why don't you write for children?"

   Duh! I had spent years and years as a children's librarian. Why didn't I think of that?

   So I did.  Write for children from their POV, rather than about them.

   I still love short story writing. I still harbor a secret desire to wake up one morning reincarnated as John Cheever, although even Cheever might have a tough time breaking into print in today's market. Currently "little" magazines are filled with well-established authors.  I am really lucky to have been included in those YA anthologies mentioned above.  The authors for these collections have some kind of connection to the editor, either personal or professional. In my case, Ann Angel, the editor of both Such a Pretty Face and Secrets I'll Never Tell is a friend from the Vermont College MFA writing program. I keep a file of short story ideas, because you never know when someone might invite you to submit to an anthology, usually organized to a specific theme.

  Speaking of anthologies and breaking into print, here is your opportunity to be part of an anthology sponsored by WeNeedDiverseBooks.org and to be published by Crown Books for Young Readers in 2019.  Go for it! (I'd enter myself but this is specifically for unpublished writers!!!)

   I'll end this post with a picture of how I wrote my first stories. This is a my dad's 1914 Royal that  he bought secondhand in 1946 to attend night school. Talk about "pounding the keys." If you didn't throw your whole weight into typing, those keys didn't move.  Amazing I ever wrote anything because typing it was a physically exhausting experience!

     Book Giveaway: You have until Monday, Oct 16th to enter the book give-away for fellow Teaching Author Carmela Martino's new book Playing by Heart.  Click here to enter.

posted by Mary Ann Rodman

Getting It Right

    First off, a big Teaching Authors welcome to our latest TA, Carla McClafferty. Not only did Carla and I meet and bond some fifteen years ago at an SCBWI retreat in Arkansas, we once shared an editor. Greetings, old friend, and welcome aboard. For the next couple of posts we are going to be talking about your genre, non-fiction, and what it shares with fiction.

    I have always wanted to be a Carla-sort of writer, a non-fiction writer. "Write what you love" is one of those things writing teachers (like me) tell their students. I love non-fiction. My "adult" reading consists almost entirely of biographies and history. If I read two adult novels a year, that's a big deal for me.

   So why don't I write non-fiction for children?  The reasons are endless, so I'll boil it down to one.  I just can't stick to the facts.

    Both of my novels, Yankee Girl and Jimmy's Stars began life as memoirs. YG was about my life, JS about my mother's family. Because they both took place in other times and places...Mississippi 1964 and Pittsburgh 1943...I did a boatload of research to make sure I had the details right. For the World War II world of Jimmy's Stars, I made a timeline of what battles occurred where and when between September 1943 and September 1944, and when news of those battles reached the States.  I compiled a radio schedule for the Pittsburgh stations. I studied streetcar routes. I poured over the various rationing schedules for gasoline, food, clothing.

    You would think that Yankee Girl would not require quite so much research, since after all, this was based on my own elementary school years.  I even had my 5th and 6th grade diaries. Still....do you remember what week the Beatles' "I Feel Fine" reached number one on the charts?  Neither did I.  Since the main character is a huge Beatles fan, there is at least one reference to a Beatles' song in every chapter. In addition, this the height of the Civil Rights Movement (the Selma March to Montgomery occurs about three quarters of the way through YG). I had to know exactly what date  this protest or that bombing occurred.  I remembered that these things had happened but that wasn't enough. I had to know exactly when. I spent a dismal five months in the microfilm room of the Jackson Mississippi library, going through a year's worth of newspapers, reliving a sad and scary time.

    By now you are thinking, "Well, with all this research, why didn't she just go ahead an write those memoirs?"  Good question. All I can say is that my mind refuses to march in a straight line . Yes the facts are there, because they are part of the story.  But once I start writing, my "real" character refuses to stick to their own "real" story.  I start thinking "but wouldn't it be more interesting if this happened instead?  Or if her best friend was this kind of person?"  Before I know it, I am off on a completely different story than I had first intended. The only thing that remains the same is the structure of historical fact and detail that makes the story "real" for me (and hopefully for the reader as well.)

    I am just beginning to write contemporary fiction for young people and guess what?  There is no less research involved.  Next month I will have a story in a YA anthology called Things I'll Never Say. 
I live in Georgia.  My main characters live in Georgia.  I have lived here for fourteen years.  Yet, for a 3,000 word story here are just a few story points I needed to find out to make the story real:  price of admission to the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, driving times between different towns, the academic school year of Emory University, the most popular spring break towns with Georgia teens...well, you get the point.

    My point?  Getting the details right is one of the ingredients for making a story real.  Editors care about details. I spent weeks nattering back and forth with my Yankee Girl editor over the dates of those Beatles songs.  Readers care.  I had an adult write me that if the mother in Yankee Girl used a steam iron, then she didn't also need to sprinkle her clothes before ironing. I was a little miffed that someone could read a 225 page book and this is what she chose to write me. It never occurred to me look up that sprinkling/steam iron detail.  That's the way my mom always ironed. (I still probably need to look that up.)

    I once read a Big Time Award Winning Book that took place in a state where I had lived and knew very well.  This author had placed four major cities within an hours drive of each other. In reality, they were in different corners of the state and hours away from each other.  Whatever affection I had for the book died right then. Good grief, anybody could look at an atlas (this was pre-Internet) and see where those cities were.  I later read an interview by the author and discovered that she had never visited that state (or apparently done any research) but she "knew" somebody who "used" to live there. That was one of those moments when you want to scream and throw the book across the room.

   That was the moment when I decided that for me, getting the details "right." Facts are front and center of a non-fiction, but they are no less important in fiction.

     Now about that steam iron....

  Posted by Mary Ann Rodman