After a full year of writing five days a week, six hours a day, I had a grand total of $97.50 in my Hawaii account. Most workers who get paid less than seven cents an hour would be unhappy, but I was elated whenever a piece of writing got published, and those small acceptances made me keep trying.
For Mother’s Day that year, Anne gave me a painting she had done of two palm trees on a beach—to encourage me to get to Hawaii, she said. The painting still hangs in my office, a reminder not only of the path I’ve walked as a writer, but also of my good fortune in having a daughter who understands my dreams.
It finally dawned on me that I might have more success at hitting the target if I narrowed my aim. I made a list of the three magazines I most wanted to see my work published in. The Writer topped my list. I read every word of that magazine each month, paying close attention to the advice from professional writers. Someday I hoped to be a successful writer who could give pointers to beginners.
Next on my list was the Reader’s Digest because it published many inspirational articles of the kind I was trying to write.
The third magazine I chose was Good Housekeeping. My mother subscribed to it, and so did I. I enjoyed its short stories and its articles about family life.
When I sat down to write each day, I tried to aim for the Reader’s Digest with nonfiction and Good Housekeeping with fiction. This helped me slant my material, but even so my Hawaii account grew slowly.
One night I saw a newspaper ad for a large department store. The ad said, “Win a Trip to Hawaii! Write twenty-five words or less on Why I Want to Go to Hawaii, and you could win a trip for two, all expenses paid.”
My pulse raced. This should be a snap, I thought. I’m a writer, and I want to go to Hawaii. Surely I could think of twenty-five words to say. I grabbed a pencil and a piece of paper. Twenty-five words? In no time I had a couple of hundred words, which is when I realized that a good contest entry might be trickier than I thought. I began the slow process of condensing long phrases into short ones and eliminating unnecessary words.
I spent that evening and all of the next day composing my masterpiece. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I know I used words like “aloha” and “beach” and “pineapple.” I copied my entry carefully on clean paper, drove to the store that was sponsoring the contest, and put it in a large box just inside the entrance. The box already overflowed with several hundred other entries. My confidence melted away. I returned home, sat at my desk, and began to write yet another short story. If I didn’t win the contest, perhaps I could sell the story and add the payment to my Hawaii account.
Two weeks later, the phone call came. I had won! The trip was for only two people, but I asked if Carl and I could pay for our children and take them along. The store manager said we could.
The trip cleaned out my writing account and made a big dent in our family savings, but all four of us spent a marvelous week in Hawaii. We toured a pineapple factory and visited the Pearl Harbor memorial. We drove around Oahu in a jitney. We spent hours each day on the wonderful beaches.
Throughout that week, I glowed with the knowledge that this happened because I was a writer. My creativity had earned this wonderful vacation for us! That awareness enhanced everything I did each day and sang me to sleep every night.
When we got home, I returned to my daily writing schedule, but I wondered if there might be other contests where the contestants had to write some thing in order to win. If the prize went to someone whose name was randomly selected, I didn’t bother to enter. I wanted to earn the prize with words.
Before long I read about a dog food company’s contest. Entrants were asked to write fifty words about “Why My Dog Is Worth Her Weight in Gold.” Well! I had been writing about my wonderful animals ever since the Dog Newspaper when I was ten years old.
The first-prize winner would receive an ounce of gold for each pound that his or her dog weighed. I carried George, our part-Pekinese, part-Cairn terrier, part-unknown to our bathroom scale. Sixteen pounds. Wishing George were a Saint Bernard, I started to write.
If I won first place, I planned to stuff George with dog treats prior to his weigh-in and then use my winnings as the down payment on a new car, which we badly needed.
I poured my love for George into that entry, but the first prize went to someone else.
However, a few weeks after the contest closed, our mailman knocked on the door with a package. I tore it open and learned that I had won second place. I lifted out my prize: a Krugerrand, a one-ounce gold coin of the Republic of South Africa.
The Krugerrand was shiny and pretty, but I wasn’t sure what I would do with it. It was barely heavy enough to be a paperweight. Still, it meant a contest judge somewhere had liked my writing, and that knowledge was the real prize.
A few days after the gold coin arrived, Carl called me from work and said, “I found a company that buys precious metal. If you want to sell your coin, they’ll give you six hundred and fourteen dollars for it.”
Six hundred and fourteen dollars! It wouldn’t buy a car, but I could keep myself in typewriter ribbons, paper, and postage for a long time with that much money. The next day I parted with my piece of gold.
I bought a subscription to a newsletter for people who enter contests as a hobby. Through this source, I learned of several other writing-type contests.
I won a slow-cooker pot from the American Dairy Association by writing why milk is good for you. I won a clothes dryer by writing a poem about why I needed one, and after toiling over twenty-five words about “Why I Like Shasta Pop,” I won the chance to run through a grocery store for five minutes. Anything I could put in the cart in five minutes was mine!
On the morning of my race through the supermarket, Carl stayed home from work and we kept Anne (a fourth-grader) and Bob (a sixth-grader) out of school for a couple of hours so that they could go along.
I wore my best tennis shoes. The store manager, who seemed almost as pleased as I was, greeted me with a lovely corsage of white carnations. Then he started the timer, and I was off.
“Get cases of Twinkies!” yelled Bob.
“Root beer! Candy bars!” shouted Anne.
Apparently my children thought the purpose of the prize was to load my shopping cart with all the treats I would normally never buy.
When my five minutes were up, I had two grocery carts heaped with nutritious food plus enough Twinkies, candy bars, and root beer to keep my children happy for months.
This exciting morning gave me much more than free groceries. It validated my skill as a writer.
I’ve always loved baseball, and so has Carl. Bob is an even bigger fan than we are. During the fourteen years that we lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, we saw many Giants’ games at Candlestick Park. When we moved to Washington State in 1970, we sorely missed having a professional baseball team to cheer for, so when Seattle got an American League franchise in 1977 we went to the very first Seattle Mariners’ game. We’ve been Mariners’ fans ever since.
One April night when Bob and Anne were in high school, we attended a Mariners’ game. As the fans entered the Kingdome, each was handed a printed flyer. I read mine after we were seated and could hardly concentrate on the game.
The Seattle Mariners were having a contest! They wanted people to write twenty-five words or less on “Why I Love Baseball.” The first prize, a cruise to Mexico, didn’t interest me a whole lot, but there were twenty-three other prizes of season tickets to the Mariners’ games. Bob’s eyes sparkled as he pointed to that line. “Go for it, Momma,” he urged.
As always, I spent several hours composing my entry. Because I was a true baseball fan, I knew the lingo. This is what I wrote: “Baseball gives me steals and deals, fouls and howls, umps and slumps, beers and cheers, frills and thrills, hitters and spitters—and I love it!”
When the winners were announced, the Kehret household celebrated. My entry had won season tickets! I received my prize, as did the other winners, in the Kingd
ome before a game. I walked out to home plate, accepted my tickets, and had my picture taken with one of the players. I carried a baseball for Bob, and several players autographed it. What fun we had that summer, cheering for our favorite team.
A neighbor who learned of my prizes commented, “You’re always winning something. You’re so lucky!”
But it wasn’t luck; it was hard work. Each contest entry took hours of creative effort. I wrote and rewrote jingles, I revised each sentence dozens of times, I experimented with and abandoned countless ideas. For a contest entry, every word is crucial, and a short sentence must be as effective as a long one.
One day a friend called to tell me there was a contest on the back of the Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Dinner box. The grand prize was a new car.
“Is it a lottery-type contest,” I asked, “or do you have to write something in order to win?” She couldn’t remember.
Since we still needed a car, I immediately bought a box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Dinner. The contest was what I had hoped for: “In twenty-five words or less complete the statement, ‘I Like Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Dinner because…’”
According to the rules, winners would be chosen on the basis of “originality, aptness of thought, and sincerity of expression.” Since originality was mentioned first, I was determined to come up with a fresh, new idea, something that would make my entry stand out from the thousands of others.
I labored long and hard. My entry was different from anything I’d done before, and I used exactly twenty-five words. The concept was original, the words were appropriate, and no contestant could have been more sincere. My family really did like Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Dinners, and it was a good thing because the more time I spent at my desk, the less I spent in the kitchen.
Entries had to be received by December I, 1978. I mailed mine on September 25, to be sure it arrived in time. The rules said that winners would be notified within thirty days of when the contest closed. That meant I should hear by New Year’s Eve. Maybe they’ll do it a little early, I thought. What a great Christmas gift a new car would be! That didn’t happen, but I still believed I would win because I knew it was the most creative entry I’d ever written.
When New Year’s Day, 1979, came and went with no word from Kraft, I lost hope of winning that new car. The fresh, creative idea that I’d been so excited about had not even merited one of the runner-up prizes.
But on January 8th, I received a letter saying I was a finalist and enclosing a form for me to sign, stating that my entry was my own work.
My hopes soared as I mailed the form back.
I was jittery for the rest of the week. Each day I rushed to the mailbox as soon as the mail was delivered, hoping for a letter from Kraft.
Nine days later, I got a phone call. I had won the grand prize! I screamed and jumped up and down. I called Carl at work. “I won the car!” I yelled “I won the car!”
I ran across the street and told my neighbor. I called the friend who had let me know about the contest and made a date to treat her to lunch. I could barely wait for Bob and Anne to get home from school so I could tell them. I told George at least ten times, and he always wagged his tail.
Two weeks later, I drove home from the car dealership in my brand new white Honda Civic. How I loved that car! It was fun to drive, got great gas mileage, and represented all my hopes and dreams of being a successful writer. I drove it until Anne graduated from college; then we gave it to her as a graduation gift, and she drove it for several years more.
Here is my winning entry: I like Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Dinner because …
it solves my menu puzzle.
{ 7 }
Pretending to Be Someone Else
My contest prizes came over a period of twelve years. During that time, I continued to write five pages daily and submit stories and articles. Gradually, I had fewer “dejections” and more acceptance letters.
Because I love theater, I tried writing skits and one-act plays. When a few were published, I wrote more. I also kept writing both fiction and nonfiction for religious magazines such as Home Life, the Christian Herald, and Catholic Digest.
One summer I went to the Pacific Northwest Writers’ Conference. On the first day, I intended to go to a panel on marketing but got lost on campus and ended up in the wrong building. I didn’t realize my mistake until the session started.
I thought it would have been rude to get up and leave, so instead of the panel on marketing, I heard a panel on writing for magazines such as True Confessions, True Experience, and True Story. I had never read any of these magazines but since I was stuck in the wrong room, I listened to what the panel members said. I learned that these magazines publish stories written from the first-person viewpoint, as if the events of the story had happened to the narrator. Most of the stories were about family problems, the same sort of story I was writing.
“But don’t the stories have to be true?” someone in the audience asked.
“The writer must sign a statement that the story is based on truth,” one of the writers explained. “That’s a pretty broad statement. Usually I base my stories on something I read in the newspaper.”
That’s what I do, I thought, only I sell my stories about family problems to religious magazines.
“The pay ranges from three cents to five cents per word, depending on the magazine,” one of the speakers said.
That got my attention! I usually received either a half-cent or one cent per word for my stories.
When I got home, I bought copies of the magazines the panel had talked about and read them from cover to cover. I sent for their writer’s guidelines.
Then I wrote a story about how I accidentally saw my son stealing money from my purse. Bob had not done this, of course, but the story was based on truth; a former neighbor had once asked my advice about this situation.
It was a family story with a moral, exactly what I had been writing all along, only this time, instead of submitting it to one of the religious magazines, I sent it to True Experience, where it sold for three cents per word.
My story was titled “My Son Was a Thief,” and Bob was outraged until I pointed out that my name did not appear in the magazine.
All the stories in True Experience were published without a byline, the phrase that tells who the author is, such as “by Peg Kehret.” Also, I had the good sense to name the son in the story something other than Bob.
Thus began my years of imagining myself in someone else’s shoes. I wrote about family problems, medical problems, and social problems. In the process, I learned to write fiction that was based on true events.
Because all of these stories were written from the first-person viewpoint, as if they had really happened to me, my family and friends teased me about all the peculiar things I had supposedly experienced. I loved pretending to be other people. It was like being an actress without the stage fright.
I became caught up in each of my characters so that they seemed real to me. I often thought about them, mentally revising the story, even when I was far from my typewriter.
Once we were driving along in ninety-degree heat when Carl glanced over at me and said, “Are you cold? You’re shivering!”
“I’m writing about someone whose car plunges into an icy river,” I explained.
He just shook his head.
Because there were no bylines, I could write as many stories as I wanted. Ideas floated through my mind like flakes in a snow globe that’s been vigorously shaken, and I often had more than one story in the same magazine. One unforgettable issue of True Confessions contained five of my stories.
This meant I had to imagine myself in the minds and bodies of five very different people. Here are the five people I pretended to be that month:
1. A teenager guilty of a hit-and-run accident.
2. A middle-aged woman who had the only matching kidney for her sister, who needed a transplant. But the sisters had not spoken for years.
3. A young mother whose baby had a disease that causes bones to break easily.
4. A black grandmother who was selected by a white family for an Adopt-a-Grandmother program. (That idea came from an article in the New York Times. The editor of True Confessions sent it to me along with a note saying, “Maybe this would make a story.”)
5. A construction worker who found a large sum of money inside the walls of a building he was demolishing. He had to decide whether to keep it to pay his son’s medical bills or turn it over to the building’s owner.
Five stories in one issue! My imagination worked overtime as I envisioned having problem after problem. All of the stories had sound morals, and I was proud of them.
I especially liked to read the “Letters to the Editor” pages in the magazines because readers often wrote to say that one of my stories had helped them solve a similar problem.
One summer I wrote my way through the medical shelf of my public library. Besides the kidney transplant and the brittle bone disease, I wrote about having a heart attack, getting my leg amputated, and refusing to vaccinate my children. On paper, I had a different ailment every week.
I was careful to verify any medical information that I used, either by reading medical journals or by asking questions of my own doctor. But I wrote less about the disease itself than about the feelings of the people involved. I knew what it was like to be sick and afraid. I knew how it felt to lie helpless in a hospital bed. I could write convincingly about people who had those feelings.
As I crafted these stories, I learned to create characters who had believable motivations for their actions. The dialogue had to be realistic. Each story needed conflict and suspense. The more stories I wrote, the more confident I became.
The same editor who sometimes sent suggestions for stories asked if I would write a serial. She wanted a chapter a month for seven months.
I dove right in with a mystery about a haunted house. Telling the story in seven chapters taught me how to write a novel. Each chapter had to have a suspenseful ending that would make the readers want to buy the next issue. Later, when I began to write novels for children, this experience helped me craft the “cliff-hanger” chapter endings that readers love.