"Everybody Change Places!" by M. J. Amft, Part 3

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 110

Click here to read "Everybody Change Places!" Part 1

Click here to read "Everybody Change Places!" Part 2

Sometimes the hunch to try “everyone change places!” comes partway through a story. One of mine was coming along nicely. A funny, bossy mother was advising her daughter not to moon over a summer romance, waiting for a Christmas reunion. In the background (away at college) there was a sympathetic sister. The characters were lively and the dialogue bright, but who really listens to a mother or sister? Change places! I sent the girl off to college, killed off the sister, shoved mama in the background, and gave the girl a funny, bossy roommate and sold that story.

I once saw a young nursemaid at a summer resort. She was dimwitted, with a homely face and a figure like Sophia Loren’s. A young boy was snowing her but behind her back snickering about the “good time” he was going to have with her before he dumped her. I tried writing a story from her point of view, but I couldn’t identify with a stupid, slow but physically full-blown girl, and I didn’t think Seventeen readers could either. So I tried changing point of view to the boy’s side. But no one can see himself as a complete cad, and the boy began developing redeeming features, seeing the girl as an unfortunate human being, not just “a body.” Still she was out of his class, and when (on the last page) his snobbish cousins, a boy and a girl, appeared, he had to snub the girl to save face. Just before slipping the story into the brown envelope, I read it one more time. The hero seemed unbelievable. He had gone through too many character changes in too short a time, and the last-page cousins interested me more than anyone.

Out came my lethal pen. I killed off the hero. I had the girl cousin become the main character and the storyteller. She became the one who met and befriended the voluptuous dimwit. She sat helplessly by while the cad cousin made his plans, and a totally new hero came out of nowhere and wrapped the story up in a surprising and most satisfactory way. That story sold.

It is hard to mutilate your characters. It is hard to write fiction. You have to start with so little: a brief scene glimpsed; a sentence overhead; an old emotion suddenly remembered; an outstanding face; someone’s trite tale of woe or joy. From these small kernels you must create characters who are real; who act, react, and interact. But as a fiction writer you have one big advantage. If your characters are not right for the part, you can command them to change roles. They are your characters, and if it will make for a better story, you can make a handsome hero change places with an ugly girl. If there is something wrong with your mother, you can try her out as a father. If a big brother becomes too sentimental, you can tell him to be a little sister.

Be bossy with your characters. Shove them around. Be courageous. Pick up your pen and give them the order: “Everybody change places! Now!” While your pen is slashing—altering genders, changing ages, shifting loyalties—you’ll feel pain, and sometimes it won’t even work. But if it does—ah! Your labor will be forgotten in the knowledge that thousands will read your story; some will reread it; some will share it with friends; and some will never completely forget it.