Been There, Done That: Writing Stories from Real Life [Paperback]

Award-winning and bestselling authors turn their own real-life experiences into captivating works of fiction!

Where do authors get their ideas? And how do they turn those ideas into stories? This anthology looks at the process of taking real-life experiences and turning them into works of engaging fiction. The collection features award-winning and bestselling middle-grade authors who provide both original fictional short stories as well as the nonfiction accounts that inspired them. The contributing authors include Julia Alvarez, Karen Cushman, Margarita Engle, Dee Garretson, Nathan Hale, Matthew Kirby, Claire Legrand, Grace Lin, Kate Messner, Linda Sue Park, Adam Rex, Gary Schmidt, Alan Sitomer, Caroline Starr Rose, Heidi Stemple, Rita Williams-Garcia, Tracy Edward Wymer, Lisa Yee, and Jane Yolen.Mike Winchell is a veteran English teacher and a secondary education curriculum specialist. He lives in upstate New York with his wife and two children, where he writes middle grade fiction and edits middle grade and young adult anthologies.

Eglantine Ceulemans was born in the flemish Belgium and lived there for 10 years. She then moved to France, where she currently resides in Lyon. In 2007, she joined the Emile Cohl School of Art there, transforming her passion for illustration into a vocation. She loves combining humor and sensitivity in a way that touches both children and their parents in her illustrations. Eglantine has been published in France and abroad for both fiction and illustrated books.WHAT REALLY HAPPENED
Love, Like Leeches
by Gary D. Schmidt
 
Probably the best job I ever had—the best job I ever will have—was a job at a summer camp on the maintenance crew. I had to deal with plugged up toilets and corn dogs and kids who threw up—mostly because of corn dogs—but I also built a new cabin and messed around in boats that needed repair and put in docks and planted gardens and buillÓ*