Been There, Done That: Writing Stories from Real Life

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 the creator & editor of BEEN THERE, DONE THAT (Grosset & Dunlap), a thematic anthology series with a kid-friendly Common Core tie in, in which a who's who of award-winning and bestselling MG/YA authors share a nonfiction narrative, and then write a related short story in order to show the "from-life-to-page" process of taking real-life experiences and transforming them into works of fiction.

Mike is also the author of the forthcoming middle grade narrative nonfiction GILDED AGE series (Christy Ottaviano/Macmillan), beginning with SPARKS: THE GILDED AGE BATTLE TO RUN THE WORLD (2017), to be followed by THE ROUGH RODE: THE GILDED AGE RISE OF THE ROUGH RIDERS (2018).

A veteran English teacher and a secondary education curriculum specialist, Mike lives in upstate New York with his wife and two children.

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.