“Everybody Change Places!” Part 1

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 102

Despite the fact that this is going to make my entries seem lifeless and uninspired in comparison, I’m going to have a guest blogger this week. I dug up this article, written by my late grandmother M. J. Amft and published in The Writer magazine in 1969 and thought it’d be a shame not to share it. And it fits perfectly with our current topic of characterization.

I need to get a more complete bio put together, but in the meantime, here’s the ‘About the Author’ blurb they published at the bottom of the first column: “M. J. Amft has had more than thirty stories published in Seventeen. Two of these were reprinted in an anthology, Seventeen from Seventeen (Macmillan), another in a high school literature textbook, Counterpoint in Literature (Scott, Foresman), and another translated and reprinted in a Swedish teenage magazine, Bild. Mrs. Amft’s record is an encouraging one for the free-lance writer, since, she writes, ‘I have never had an agent, never had any “ins” with anyone, have never met a Seventeen editor, did all my own typing (even though I’m a rotten typist), and had to be on duty as “Mother” during all the writing.’”


EVERYBODY CHANGE PLACES!

By M. J. Amft

Your story has an instant-appeal beginning, a smooth-toned, fast-paced middle, and an end. It is slanted for a definite market, and it’s all typed, ready to go. But there is something wrong with that story.

This may be a story saved by, “When I say, ‘Go!’ everybody change places!”

No matter that your characters are very much alive. You made them, and you can unmake them. They are your characters, and you can shake them all up and turn mothers into fathers, boys into girls, minor villains into major heroes. You have the power. All you need is the courage and a pen.

My neatly typed story was the tale of a glamorous boy, stuck in a hospital bed, bored to death, and happy to have a nice little candy striper while away the dreary hours. When he left the hospital, he forgot all about her and went back to his glamorous life. You saw the story from her viewpoint, and you knew how painful it was for her. She took it philosophically—remembering that she too had treated a devoted but drab visitor of her own, when she was once a patient, in much the same way—but you knew how crushed she was that with this charming boy it was all over, permanently.

“All over, permanently!” That was what was wrong! A girl never realizes that it is all over (unless she reads a wedding announcement, and this boy was too young for that). A girl always has hope. Maybe he is trying to reach her and somehow just missing her each time. Maybe he is ill or his parents have whisked him halfway around the world. A girl can go on hoping and on and on waiting. But boys don’t have to wait and hope! Boys can, and do, pursue the issue.

“O.K., Ronnie,” I said. “You are going to be a girl, and you, my little candy striper, are going to be a boy.”

To be continued…