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Adapting short stories for US markets

edited March 2012 in - Resources
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

  • Hi, David, why not do an introduction thread to tell us about yourself?
    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.
  • The American and British Court system is different. - Hubby's an almost lawyer here and an attorney there.
    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.
  • Hi David
    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?
  • edited March 2012
    See the "Americanisms" thread for a website which lists some common differences (post dated March 2012).

    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.
  • edited March 2012
    I looked at some stories I’ve had accepted by a US publisher to see what the editor changed. I found mostly spellings:

    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”.

    I’ve 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
  • There may be a difference in spelling with judgement, acknowledgement and any others. Never can remember if one nation prefers to omit the 'e'.
  • Thanks Jay, and everyone else, for your food for thought. I've changed the spellings on that particular story and got rid of some of the British-sounding words, like 'banter'. The court thing isn't a big deal as there isn't much on the actual court process as we would know it, as it's sci-fi and set in the near future. Now I have it being double-checked by a living breathing American before it sets sail over the pond...
  • In a sailboat?
  • This blog will tell you everything you could possibly hope to know about submitting to US agents/publishers.

    http://www.annemini.com/
  • Agh, paper size! That's a very useful link, thanks!
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