DONIS CASEY: Write Errant

I am pleased to welcome my March Tell Me Your Story Guest, Shelley Burbank. Shelley is is a mystery and women’s fiction author and journalist based in Maine and Guam. Her short fiction has been published nationally in True Story, True Love, and True Confessions magazines. Regional and literary publications include San Diego Woman Magazine, The Maine Review, and the mystery anthology Crime Under the Sun. Shelley was also the co-writer of a full-length, nonfiction memoir, THE LAST TEN DAYS: Academia, Dementia, and the Choice to Die by Martha Risberg Brosio.
Shelley’s debut women’s fiction/mystery novel Final Draft: An Olivia Lively Mystery was published by Encircle Publications in March 2023, and her latest novel, Night Moves: An Olivia Lively Mystery came out in August 2024.
Shelley’s working on several projects including a women’s fiction novel, a women’s fiction novella set in Guam based on her current adventures overseas, and a short mystery story featuring her Olivia Lively, P.I. character. Shelley is one of my fellow bloggers on the international mystery website Type M for Murder, where she contributes her insights every other Friday. She keeps an online writing journal on her own website ShelleyBurbank.com. Her free newsletter on creativity, purpose, and lifestyle, Pink Dandelions, comes out once a month direct to subscriber inboxes. Sign up and/or sample at https://shelleyburbank.substack.com/

Shelley gives us one of the best descriptions I’ve seen in a long time of how authors are made. Read and be enlightened!

How Barbie Dolls Made Me a Writer

By Shelley Burbank

Fashion dolls inspired one of my first attempts at fiction writing, and this early awareness of attire in relation to character-building continues to have an influence on my storytelling today. To put it less academically, I like to write about clothes. It started at an early age.

***

It’s the early 1970s. My mother takes me and my younger sister along while she shops at Freeses, a department store at the Airport Mall near the Bangor International Airport. I’m five or six. Sis and I play amongst the racks at the store, hiding behind the hanging clothes while my mother browses. Finally, we end up at the toy department, and on this day we are each allowed to pick out a Dawn Doll take home. These are miniature fashion dolls, like Barbies, only teeny. They come in different colors of hair, eyes, and fashions. It takes a long time to pick just one out of the many tempting choices.

A few years later, we each get Malibu Barbies for Christmas. With blunt, slightly greasy-feeling blonde hair and painted on blue eyes, our Barbies wear turquoise bathing suits and matching shoes. We have just a few changes of clothing for them. I especially like an orange winter coat and any plastic knee-high boots. I try to make my own no-sew doll clothes out of fabric scraps. Lots of wrapping and tying. Lots of ripping of holes for arms and legs and heads. Not very satisfactory.

At Service Merchandise and Kay Bee Toys, I stare with yearning at the many Barbie fashions on display in their flat, plastic cases. Inside, along with each outfit, is a multi-folded “catalog” showing all the available fashions for sale. I’m awash in desire for these outfits. I never ask for the car or the dreamhouse, maybe because I know the answer will be no or maybe I just love the clothes.

Over the years we acquire more dolls, including ballerina Barbies that kick up their legs if you bend them just right and a Miss America Barbie with a scepter, crown permanently attached to her head (irritating for play), and a regal red robe trimmed in fake ermine.

We never get Ken dolls. We chop the hair off one of the old Malibu Barbies, and we dress her in pants to stand in for Ken. (Weird Barbie from the movie is not a stretch at all!) The breasts bother me because they ruin the pseudo-male effect, but you make do with what you have when you are kind-of-poor and live in rural Maine and Kens are hard to come by.

“Playing Barbies” provides a different kind of entertainment than “playing baby dolls” or “make-believe.” Playing baby dolls involves changing diapers made out of our father’s white handkerchiefs, using our old, real-life Playtex bottles with the brown nipples for feeding time, and swaddling the dolls in blankets, tucking the last fold beneath them and laying them down to sleep. It’s about nurturing and mimicking.

Make-believe, on the other hand, is pure invention. We play lions and cougars, astronauts, cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians–or else the horses they rode in on. We climb trees, run around the lawn, ride our bikes down the smooth dirt road in front of our house and pretend broomsticks are horses. We grasp covers of kitchen pots for shields. We brandish sticks or rulers for swords. We make up stories, characters, and situations, sometimes with beginnings, middles, and ends. Sometimes not. Sometimes we leave ourselves hanging for a sequel.

End of day. Bathtime. Jammies. Books read to us, often Little Golden Books bought at the Shop n’ Save grocery store on Broadway. Finally, a tuck in and a good-night kiss, and off to dreamland. Maybe first, before sleep, whispering, making up a story, or else just daydreaming of adventures great and small, or wishes. For ice-cream. For swimming. For pretty Easter dresses.

***

Gradually, I realize books are important to me. I become a reader.

My kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Clater, takes our whole class to the Bangor Public Library to get our library cards. I learn to read and write. We make “calendar books” which are white paper stapled between colored sheets of construction paper. We copy out the month’s calendar on one of the pages, and every day we write one calendar page. We draw pictures with crayon and write as best we can with the letters and spelling we’ve acquired.

This is my favorite school activity besides recess.

At some point, experiences converge. One day–and I don’t know for sure what grade this is, but it’s probably second or maybe the end of first–I’m thinking up a story and get the exciting idea to WRITE IT DOWN on paper.

I write about Barbie and her friends, Skipper and Ken. They are all going to a fancy party. I picture the pink Barbie convertible they will ride in, but what I’m most concerned with are the clothes. I describe each outfit, and I am careful not to repeat any color in any outfit. Not repeating any color is very important to me that day.

“Ken wears red pants and a blue shirt. Barbie wears a green skirt and purple shirt. Skipper wears a pink sweater and yellow skirt.”

Looking back at this story now, I find one thing significant. While the aesthetic left much to be desired, I had devised a story with purpose and according to my own “rules.” In other words, I’d already begun to think about craft, to think about what makes a story “good.”

The physical copy of this story has been lost. However, I do have in my possession a different story from around that same time period or maybe a year later. “Kathy Gets Saved” is written on that soft, yellow, pulpy paper with the blue lines they used to hand out at school. My main character wants her best friend, Kathy, to come over to play. She negotiates this request with her mother who invites Kathy’s entire family to visit, and then Kathy spends the night. The next day, Kathy accompanies my character to Sunday school and has a religious experience. I don’t mention the clothes at all. This story is closer to autofiction. More realism than fantasy.

[Have I mentioned I was raised as an evangelical? My parents probably kept this story because it signaled that the church’s teachings had infiltrated and taken hold. Why and how they exfiltrated is a tale for another day.]

The 70s roll into the 80s. As my childhood passes, I continue to write stories. In seventh grade, I attempt my first full-length book with chapters. Complete with colored illustrations and written in a red notebook, this story would be marketed today as “The Blue Lagoon in the Maine woods.”

I’m laughing as I type this. My friend, Kara, who did not go to the same religious school, had told me about the Brooke Shields movie. I might have watched it even on HBO at her grandmother’s house. It made an impression.

I write my “two teenagers lost in the Maine woods” romance to share with my female classmates. There is a DIY marriage ceremony beneath the trees. I describe the wedding dress. There’s a log cabin. A brook for washing. A baby comes along at some point. By this time I’ve read many Barbara Cartland regencies and Harlequin romances. I know things.

My story isn’t really scandalous, but it feels daring just the same. Provocative. At least my hero puts a ring on it first, as best he can, considering the circumstances. My classmates like it.

Then, it’s April break of that year. I bring the notebook with me on a week-long school bus trip to Washington D.C. Somewhere on that trip, I lose the notebook. I probably leave it on the bus. Perhaps the driver tosses it.

Possibly after reading it.

Possibly deciding it isn’t appropriate for a thirteen-year-old Baptist school girl. I’ll never know for sure.

***

Playing is storytelling. The leap from play to writing a story on paper is significant but not especially difficult or unusual. If you’ve been read to and have learned to read and write, you have the skills necessary to begin. At some point, if you are a writer, you will want to try to do it yourself, to see if you can make what you are imagining in your head come out on the page. You’ll be inspired by stories you hear, books you read, films you watch and do a bit of creative alchemy, mixing elements and experimenting with genres, tropes, and themes.

And that, dear reader, is what I did. I practiced for decades. In my early 50s, I wrote two mystery novels about a sassy female P.I. with a taste for fashion and a big walk-in closet full of designer clothes. Describing my characters’ fashion choices lets me tell my readers something about their social status, their culture, their historical era, and their values. It paints a picture in the readers’ minds, helps the character to be more dimensional. Plus, for me, the writer, it’s fun.

It’s almost like playing Barbies. Except on paper. With words.