Start with the basics. Check the guidelines on our home page.
- Choose a Shakespeare play; he wrote thirty-eight so you have quite a selection to choose from.
- Pull out the major themes. Things to look for: Corruption, Revenge, Love, The folly of Love, Greed, Disguise, Judgment, the Nature of Reality
- Consider a new setting. Where will your Romeo and Juliet meet? The ice cream parlor? Will Violet and Sebastian switch schools?
- Decide what to focus on, whether to tell the whole story (ambitious) or focus on a particular aspect or scene.
- Decide on the central conflict and theme. We would prefer that the central conflict and theme of your story grow out of conflicts and themes already existing in the play you’ve chosen to adapt. In this way you won’t wander too far from Shakespeare’s reason for writing the play. We want you to be creative, but not to travel so far from the original that we can’t recognize it, or that the meaning of Shakespeare’s dialogue is subverted too far from his own central message.
- Consider what fresh insight the introduction of a steampunk setting and elements will bring to Shakespeare’s existing themes and conflicts.
- It’s all about the characters. Find the emotional core of your story. Without it your story will be dead on arrival.
- Create an outline of events and match them against events in the original play. Make sure that the strongest events remain and that everything goes in its proper order.
- Create a timeline of events. After you have prepared the basic elements of your story, it can be helpful to write some kind of timeline to help you decide what should happen when.
- Give your ideas a shape, such as: Introduction (Introduces characters, setting, time, etc.); Initiating Action (The point of a story that starts the rising action); Rising Action (Events leading up to the climax/turning point); Climax (The most intense point of the story/the turning point of the story); Falling Action (your story begins to conclude); Resolution/Conclusion (a satisfying ending to the story in which the central conflict is resolved, or the main character reaches some kind of conclusion about the events of the story)
- Get down to writing—come out swinging. The first page —some would say the first sentence— of any writing should grab the reader’s attention and leave him/her wanting more. A quick start is especially important in short stories because you don’t have much room to tell your story. Don’t waste page space with long introductions of the characters or uninteresting descriptions of the setting: get right into the plot, and reveal details about the characters and setting piece-by-piece as you go along.
- Revise and edit. When you’ve finished the story, go back through it and correct mechanical mistakes, as well as logical and semantic errors. In general, make sure the story flows and the characters and their problems are introduced and resolved appropriately. If you have time, put the completed story down for a few days or weeks before editing. Distancing yourself from the story in this way will help you see it more clearly when you pick it back up.
- Get some second opinions. Send your revised and edited story off to a trusted friend or relative for revisions, edits, and suggestions. Make sure you consider everything that your reviewers tell you—not just the parts you would like to hear. Thank your reviewers for reading your story, and don’t argue with them.
- Incorporate whatever edits, revisions, and suggestions you feel are valid. Your writing will be better if you can carefully consider constructive criticism, but you don’t have to follow all the advice you get. Some of the suggestions may not be very good. It’s your story, and you need to make the final call.
- Make sure you’ve formatted your submission correctly. Use 12-point Arial, Courier or Times New Roman. Pages should be numbered consecutively. Double space the entire manuscript, with no extra spaces between paragraphs. Indent the first line of each paragraph by five spaces. Use 1″ margins all round. Save as either Microsoft Word (DOC or DOCX), Real Text Format (RTF) or OpenOffice (ODT) format.
- Check the guidelines on our home page one last time.
- Give your story a title. We’d prefer inclusion of Steampunk elements in the title of each story, i.e. “Othello, The Half-Machine Moor of Venice” or something similar.
- Prepare a brief introductory letter to submit with your manuscript, giving a an overview of the story and a short bio. Send your submission to Matt Delman at: submissions@doctorfantastiques.com no later than 12 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time on 30 May 2011.
- You’re done! Now you get to eat chocolate.
Further Reading:
- Why Shakespeare?
- Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation
- Julie Taymor’s The Tempest
- The Folger Library website
- The Folger Library YouTube channel
- American Shakespeare Center
- Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare
- How To Write Like Charles Dickens
- The Birthmark, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
