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Adapting short stories for US markets
Hi all,
Been subscribing to the mag for a while but not peeked into the forum until now.
I have lots of little bits of prose gathering dust in the corner of my hard drive and I'm methodically going through them and giving them a spit and polish before submitting them to the big wide world. It seems for my sort of writing, America is the specific bit of the big wide world I need to send them off to. I'm just not clear on how much I need to adapt these short stories for American magazines. It seems there's a number of levels of adaptation I could take them through - adapting the spellings to US English seems like a basic courtesy, and then there's going through and picking out words that may not make sense or the same sense to an American audience ('pavement', 'biscuits'), and then there's making the implicit British setting explicit to explain some of the minor cultural differences (for example, the story I'm working on at the moment is set within the British courts) and perhaps reworking those areas of difference to avoid confusion.
I'd be grateful for any advice or anecdotes on what changes you good people make when you're submitting work overseas.
Many thanks,
David
Comments
Just a thought, but a story set in the British court may not be suitable for the US market at all. (They are very parochial). Unless it has a particular relevance to the US - an American protagonist lost in the Brit system, perhaps - I doubt they would want to bother trying to understand the differences.
Procedures are different. There are far more words and phrases than you realise that mean something else entirely - or nothing at all.
The only setting that would move from here to there without too much fuss is period. Hence the success/obsession of Mr Holmes.
I've had a few short stories published in a US anthology and I only made changes to spelling and sort of 'Americanised' some of the phrases which was sufficient for them to be accepted. I don't know about stories about the British Court system - but I certainly wouldn't have thought that a specific British setting to a story would be off-putting and if I was writing a very obviously 'British' story I wouldn't change it too much or it might lose it's charm?
When I've put (car) boot it's been changed to trunk.
Possibly inverted commas - think they use single.
I'll see if I can think of other things.
learnt changed to learned;
practise (= verb) changed to practice;
towards changed to toward;
dived changed to dove;
God changed to god (lower case);
pretence changed to pretense.
I think, where we say fitted, they say fit. And that we have an innings while they have an inning.
Ive written a short story which Americans might not understand. It includes these words: lift (in a car), pushchair, building society, queue, care in the community, wee (noun), and refuse collection. I must have edited out Nancy (boy).
This is the site that lists some common differences between US and UK terms:
http://www.learnenglishfeelgood.com/usukenglish/index.html
http://www.annemini.com/