I’m super excited to be able to host author Elissa Brent Weissman here on the Cybils Award Challenge Blog. Her book Standing for Socks was nominated this year in the Middle Grade Fiction category. Please join me in welcoming Elissa as she tells us all the behind the scenes gossip!
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STANDING FOR SOCKS: Special Features
If I enjoy a DVD, I love the special features. I like it all—deleted scenes (which I usually agree were better deleted), outtakes (classic), “The making of…” with little insights into how certain parts of the movie came to be. Something about seeing the scenes being shot with partial sets and visible cameras makes me remember and reflect on the fact that someone created all of this.
It’s easy to forget, as a reader, that books are the same way. What you see on the shelf (and hopefully pick up and read!) is the final product of years of work, much of it done by a single person. Writing is a pretty solitary job, the process is often a mystery (even to the writer), and most of what’s cut stays out of sight forever. But since Michelle was so kind as to give me her blog for a day as part of the Cybils Award Challenge, I’m going to look back and see if I can provide a peek behind the curtain into the process of creating my first novel, Standing for Socks.
THE MAKING OF: The Title
My original title was just SOCKS. But Beverly Clearly wrote a book called Socks, and it’s still in print (you may know it; it’s about a cat). So my title needed to change. I came up with a bunch of ideas, my favorite being THE SOCKS MATCH, which I thought was clever in its punny double meaning. But Atheneum wanted something more straightforward, and they lobbied for VOTE FOR SOCKS. Boring. After a lot of back and forth, brainstorming, and politely declining suggestions from friends (“Crazy Socks? Well, maybe…”), I came up with STANDING FOR SOCKS, and Atheneum liked it. Phew.
OUTTAKES: The Cover
In the original cover, the girl (representing Fara, the mismatched-socks-wearing main character) was standing with one leg bent and her hand hanging out of her pocket. The image was just from the waist down, like it is now, but the way she was standing made her look saucier, older, more like an affected teen. The marketing department decided that that photo was too provocative for the age group, so they switched it to this photo, which I agree is better suited to my 11-year-old socks activist and her 8-12-year-old readers.
I was not crazy about this cover initially—I think it makes the book seem girly and fluffy, and it’s neither—but it’s grown on me. BONUS FEATURE: More about the cover, and how often I’ve been asked if those are my legs, in this guest post on the Baltimore Sun’s Read Street blog.
ALTERNATE OPENING: Chapters 1-8
Believe it or not, chapters 1-8 were not in my first draft. Everything that happened in chapters 1-8 was there, but it was all summed up in a 5-page prologue that started with “Even the best mornings took a turn for the worse when Fara opened her sock drawers.” (I kept that sentence, and other parts from the prologue, in chapter 8.)
My prologue told what happened in fifth grade, when Fara started wearing mismatched socks and became famous for it. It was my editor who thought that the story really started then, in fifth grade, and that we needed to see it play out for ourselves, not hear about it after the fact. And she was right.
AUTHOR’S COMMENTARY: Lane’s Lanes
The name of Fara’s dad’s bowling alley is a little shout-out to my dad, whose name is Lane. My brothers and I always thought he should own a bowling alley instead of a stationery store because then he could call it Lane’s Lanes (or Bowling Lane’s, or Lane’s for Bowling…the possibilities are endless!).
AUTHOR’S COMMENTARY: Chapter 16, “Sock Haters Unite”
In this chapter, Fara’s in Social Studies class reviewing all of acts of parliament that led up to the American Revolution, and she gets the idea to invite all the people who have problems with socks to form a Sockinental Congress.
When I was writing this chapter, I was sitting in my hometown library, and I was trying to remember the names of the various acts. My old laptop couldn’t handle wireless, so I had no internet access, and I thought, “Well, I’ll just look up the acts online later and fill them in.” But then I realized, “Wait, I’m in a library. There are tons of books about the Revolutionary War!” So I looked up the American Revolution in the library catalogue and found a book that listed all of the acts. It was a moment of stupidity on my part, but it made me realize just how much our lives have changed because of the internet. It never even crossed my mind at first to look something up in a book—and I write books!
NON-DELETED SCENES: Zoe’s brother
In a really brief, non-central moment, I mention that Zoe’s brother and his friends have piercings or tattoos. My editor worried that this would taint my otherwise wholesome book and possibly keep teachers from using it in their classrooms. This time I didn’t think she was right (or, if she was, decided not to worry about a ridiculous reason to censor a book). I kept it in.
DELETED SCENES: Sock market newspaper article
In order to prevent giving too much away, I’ll just say that the Sock Market scene played out differently at first. I wrote this book in college in a novel-writing workshop, and when I turned in the chapters centered around the Sock Market, they included a newspaper article by Jody. My classmates and teacher were underwhelmed by the article and by my handling of the Sock Exchange in general. So I trashed that whole segment and rethought it. As usual, they were totally right. That’s what workshops are for.
ALTERNATE ENDING: No spoilers here
I rarely know the ending of a story when I start to write. In the case of Standing for Socks, I had a general idea, but I had no clue what the specifics would be, including the way the election would play out. I thought of a few options, but none of them seemed quite right.
When I got to that part in the story, though, the characters took over and did and said things to make the story go the way it wanted. You know you’ve developed good characters when they get into trouble you don’t know how to get them out of, and, in this case, when they start to solve their own problems. I knew Fara, Jody, Phillip, and the whole crew very well by now, so I trusted that their solution was the right one.
BLOOPERS: Sock puns that didn’t fit
This book is filled with plays on the word “sock,” but I actually thought of quite a few more that didn’t make it in.
Sock-cess (success) – one of my favorites, but I just couldn’t find a spot for it
Sock-er (the sport) – Too much
Socks of Liberty (like Sons of Liberty) – I debated between this and Sockinental Congress
Sockred (sacred) – I thought of this one too late, though sock-rilege is in there
Socksy (sexy) – Maybe I could have used this if they’d kept the original cover
Can you think of any others? I’ll keep a list in case I ever write a sequel!
RETURN TO MAIN MENU
Thanks for tuning in for these select special features for Standing for Socks. It was fun to revisit the writing process and remember how things came together. Who knows, maybe book special features will become the norm as we move forward into the digital age.
From this main menu you’ve got a few options: More Special Features, Previews, and, of course, Read the Book.
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Thank you for taking the time to share with us awesome out takes! Please join Elissa on her blog at the links above. 
Today was the day Cybils Award watchers! After months of hard work by countless organizers, panelists and judges twelve awesome books were announced as the ultimate winners in their respective categories.
Hello my fellow challengers!