The Story Prize Judges: Kristen Arnett, Andy Hunter, and Tiphanie Yanique

Here come the judges: Arnett, Hunter, and Yanique

We're pleased to announce this year's judges for The Story Prize: author and librarian Kristen Arnett; writer, editor, and publisher Andy Hunter; and author Tiphanie Yanique.

Each year we enlist three independent members of the literary community to select the winner of The Story Prize from among the three finalists that Founder Julie Lindsey and Director Larry Dark choose from among the more than 100 short story collections submitted for the prize. We alternate years between having a librarian or a bookseller as a judge. At least one of the judges is an author and the other is most often a critic or editor.

The final deadline for 2019 entries is Nov. 15. We will announce the three finalists in early January 2020 and the winner at an event at The New School on Feb. 26, 2020.

(And don't forget that The Story Prize: 15 Years of Great Short Fiction, an anthology featuring stories from past Story Prize winners is available from Catapult books.)

About the judges:

Kristen Arnett is a research librarian, the New York Times bestselling author of the debut novel Mostly Dead Things, and a queer fiction and essay writer. She was awarded Ninth Letter's Literary Award in Fiction and is a columnist for Literary Hub. Her work has appeared at North American Review, TriQuarterly, Guernica, Buzzfeed, Electric Literature, McSweeney's, PBS Newshour, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her story collection, Felt in the Jaw, was published by Split Lip Press and was awarded the 2017 Coil Book Award. She is a Spring 2020 Shearing Fellow at Black Mountain Institute.

Andy Hunter is a writer, editor, and publisher interested in literary writing, the future of media, storytelling, and technology. His work is dedicated to preserving and promoting literary culture and the importance of books in the digital age. He co-founded Electric Literature in 2009, Catapult in 2014, and Literary Hub in 2015. He currently serves as publisher of Literary Hub, Catapult, Counterpoint, and Soft Skull Press.

Tiphanie Yanique is the author of the poetry collection, Wife, which won the Bocas Prize in Caribbean poetry and the Forward/Felix Dennis Prize for a First Collection. Her novel, Land of Love and Drowning, won the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the Phillis Wheatley Award for Pan-African Literature, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award. It was listed by NPR as one of the Best Book of 2014. She is also the author of a short story collection, How to Escape from a Leper Colony. Her writing has won a National Book Awards 5 Under 35 prize, the Bocas Award for Caribbean Fiction, the Boston Review Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship, and an Academy of American Poet’s Prize.

Goodbye Guest Blog Posts, Hello Author Instagram Posts

After nine years of featuring guest posts from writers whose books have been submitted for The Story Prize (538 of them, to be exact), we've jumped to another social media platform: Instagram. So far this year, we've featured 23 guest posts. We ask every writer whose book we receive to share an image (or a few images) that inspired, informed, are essential to, or represent her or his book or a particular story in it, along with a brief explanation of the image or images. Contributors so far include Michael Carroll, Amy Hempel, Cary Holladay, Carrianne Leung, Mark Mayer, Josip Novakovich, Chris Power, and Aurelie Sheehan. To see these posts, follow @TheStoryPrize on Instagram.

Video of The Story Prize Event: Jamel Brinkley, Deborah Eisenberg, and Lauren Groff (the Winner)

What The Story Prize Judges Had to Say About Deborah Eisenberg's Your Duck Is My Duck

Photo © Beowulf Sheehan

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were writer Jo Ann Beard, Washington Post book critic Ron Charles, and bookseller Veronica Santiago Liu. We include the citations in congratulatory letters we present to each finalist, along with their checks ($20,000 to the winner, $5,000 to the other two finalists). To protect the confidentiality of the judges' votes and the integrity of the process, we don't attribute citations to any particular judge.

“I love Deborah Eisenberg and believe in her work and in her vision. The subject matter she chooses is fascinating, and worthwhile, and I approached each story with renewed interest and hope. She's smart and has lived, and understands the human psyche and the hopeful hopelessness with which we all (of a certain age) approach life.”

“The stories collected in Deborah Eisenberg’s Your Duck Is My Duck feel strange, and only when you begin to vibe with their rhythms do you realize that it is, in part, because she has somehow successfully embedded her characters into your head, so that you hear with their ears, shudder with their confusions, search for the answers they don’t have and aren’t likely to have by story’s end. While the characters’ voices ring in your ears, it is almost easy to forget that each story is framed around deep loss. These absences, coupled with the absurdities that unravel inside the minds of people, make for an unexpectedly humane whole in each unique story.”

What The Story Prize Judges had to Say About Jamel Brinkley's A Lucky Man

Photo © Beowulf Sheehan

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were writer Jo Ann Beard, Washington Post book critic Ron Charles, and bookseller Veronica Santiago Liu. We include the citations in congratulatory letters we present to each finalist, along with their checks ($20,000 to the winner, $5,000 to the other two finalists). To protect the confidentiality of the judges' votes and the integrity of the process, we don't attribute citations to any particular judge.

"There is a novelistic weight to the complexity of the worlds Jamel Brinkley creates in each story in A Lucky Man. Whole stories can turn on a line—sometimes so subtle that its heft could nearly be missed—and in those lines, these sudden exposures of truth, the culmination of lies that one tells oneself to survive in the world are revealed. Even when you think you are just getting to the heart of some of these stories—while sitting on the bank of Quantico Creek, returning to the steps of Good Shepherd, or beating the shit out of a dog—you find, no, there’s more, and Jamel Brinkley is gonna go there and take us along, pools of lamplight and sun-sprinkled paths like coins lighting the way through the book. In each story, the stakes get so high, but Mr. Brinkley doesn’t shy away from meeting them, “peeling back” his characters’ histories, through “language to a hard core, like the spiked stones of peaches” the boys in “A Family” used to throw at stray dogs."

"I honestly can’t remember the last time I read a contemporary short story collection so full with the weight of our city lives that also so brazenly delivered." 

What The Story Prize Judges Had to Say About Lauren Groff's Florida

Photo © Beowulf Sheehan

When the three judges for The Story Prize make their choices, they provide citations for the books. This year's judges were writer Jo Ann Beard, Washington Post book critic Ron Charles, and bookseller Veronica Santiago Liu. We include the citations in congratulatory letters we present to each finalist, along with their checks ($20,000 to the winner, $5,000 to the other two finalists). To protect the confidentiality of the judges' votes and the integrity of the process, we don't attribute citations to any particular judge.

“Groff's collection is a truly immersive experience—each story builds upon the last, without being expressly linked, until by the end, the reader experiences the book the way you might experience Florida. Fierce and almost fully deconstructed now in its beauty and awfulness.  Amid the merciless sun like ‘hot yellow wool,’ the dense heat, the humid tangle of vines and mosquitoes, the elusive silkiness of a panther, and the cool slither of reptiles, Groff's characters emerge from their landscape fully imagined. There are imperiled children, a lost and hopeless little dog, circling ever wider until it dissipates altogether, a woman with head trauma and spectacular visions, another woman lost to others but still vivid to herself who nearly drowns in a rainstorm, a mother who dislocates herself to Paris, her sons glum at a French carousel, their mouths rimmed in green pistachio ice cream. Frilled lizards and a black raptor that falls out of the sky. Groff's dark wit and her vivid and precise language make each story into a strange, familiar world, and the cumulative effect is as staggering as the Florida sun on a summer afternoon.”

--------------------------

“Lauren Groff's Florida is that rare creation: Each of these stories offers a complex, distinct world with its own carefully composed melody, but they’re also tuned to vibrate in response to each other. Even her final, longest story, set more than 4,000 miles away in Northern France feels at once a striking departure and a perfect companion to the earlier pieces.

“Groff understands these young women, wives and mothers struggling to survive and thrive in America’s wild and febrile environment, and she writes with such empathy that we come to know them, too. Peril hovers over them all—and crashes down upon some. They live in a rapidly warming climate that produces increasingly chaotic weather. They confront threats that we imagine we’ve eradicated— nightmarish creatures of the swamp— and animal spirits of the human heart that we pretend we’ve tamed. And many of these women are caught between conflicting demands: for strength, for softness, for independence, for affection. They are smart, determined people, sorely tempted to despair, sometimes lashed to their lives only by the love they feel for their children.

“Indeed, the real triumph of this collection is its sustained tension between dread and determination, conveyed in prose that never discloses its own complexity. Florida is the work of a mature writer beyond any need to impress us with her stylistic flourishes. Groff tells these stories in clear, deceptively transparent lines laced with insight, wit, and muffled terror.”

--------------------------

“Lauren Groff is exceptional at creating atmosphere: settings heavy with heat and vegetation, yet harboring chilly layers never far from the surface. Every story in Florida is delicate with danger. Yet the danger doesn’t always arrive, isn’t always meant to arrive—or is it? We join as readers holding our breaths at these near-climaxes left unrealized, a state mirroring the moments in daily life when confrontations are avoided or averted, or when fear paralyzes. Like Amanda in ‘For the God of Love, for the Love of God,’ we are held at the point when something announcing itself, ‘in the very back of [the] head. . . . almost arrived. . . . [is] almost here.’ And we are given space to ‘let it step shyly forward into the light’: the potential, not just of that lurking danger, but also of hope.

“As I moved from story to story, I imagined a bird’s eye view of a spiritual map of Florida, with a reader cam swooping down suddenly into scrub, to a lake’s surface, to a roadway to nowhere at the opening of each new narrative.”

Lauren Groff's Florida is the 15th Winner of The Story Prize!

Photo © Beowulf Sheehan

We're pleased to announce that Lauren Groff's Florida (Riverhead Books) is the winner of The Story Prize for books published in 2018. The other finalists this year were authors Jamel Brinkley for A Lucky Man (Graywolf Press) and Deborah Eisenberg for Your Duck Is My Duck (Ecco). At the event at The New School, all three finalists read from and discussed their work on-stage. Groff received $20,000 and an engraved silver bowl. As runners-up, Brinkley and Eisenberg each received $5,000. Congratulations to Lauren Groff and Riverhead Books!

In the days and weeks to come, we'll post the judges' citations for the three books, photos from the event and after party, and a link to the video.

Award Week!

The week of March 4 is going to be a busy one for The Story Prize. (Well, at least Monday-Wednesday will be busy.)

Monday, March 4

I will be a guest on WNYC 93.5 FM's "All of It," hosted by Alison Stewart, to discuss The Story Prize: 15 Years of Great Short Fiction, published by Catapult. If you don't live in the New York area, you can listen on WNYC's website, which streams live.

Tuesday, March 5

This is the official publication date of The Story Prize anthology from Catapult. The book collects a short story from each of the 14 past winners of The Story Prize, set up by excerpts from the onstage interviews with each writer or their TSP blog posts or judges' citations.

Wednesday, March 6

The Story Prize event at The New School begins at 7:30 p.m. Finalists Jamel Brinkley, Deborah Eisenberg, and Jamel Brinkley will read from and discuss their nominated books. At the end of the evening, we'll announce the 15th winner of The Story Prize, who will receive $25,000 and an engraved silver bowl. But no one goes home empty-handed. Each of the other two finalists will receive $5,000. (And we guarantee that Green Book will not win.)

General admission tickets are $14. You can buy them in advance online or the evening of the event at The New School (66 W. 12 St.).

The Story Prize Event on March 6 at The New School: Get with the Program

Come to The Story Prize event on March 6 at The New School, and you'll not only get to see and hear writers Jamel Brinkley, Deborah Eisenberg, and Lauren Groff read from and discuss their work on stage but you'll also get to take home an eight-page, full-color program (cover below) designed by artist Calli Ryan.

At the event, you'll have the opportunity to buy from bookseller McNally Jackson signed copies of each author's short story collection, as well as copies of The Story Prize 15th anniversary anthology.

General admission tickets, which cost $14, are available online or at The New School Box office the evening of the event.

The Story Prize Longlist for Short Story Collections Published in 2018

Beyond the three finalists and The Story Prize Spotlight Award winner, here's a list (alphabetical by the author's last name) of other books we read in 2018 that particularly stood out for us:

• Training School for Negro Girls by Camille Acker (Feminist Press)
• Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Awayland by Ramona Ausubel (Riverhead Books)
• The New Order by Karen E. Bender (Counterpoint)
• Days of Awe by A.M. Homes (Viking)
• Night Beast by Ruth Joffre (Black Cat)
• Certain American States by Catherine Lacey (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Notes from the Fog by Ben Marcus (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Fight No More by Lydia Millet (W. W. Norton & Company)
• If You See Me, Don't Say Hi by Neel Patel (Flatiron Books)
• The Secret Habit of Sorrow by Victoria Patterson (Counterpoint)
• All the Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdeva (Spiegel & Grau)
• Pure Hollywood by Christine Schutt (Grove Press)
• You Think It, I'll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld (Random House)
• Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires (37 Ink/Atria)
• The Water Diviner and Other Stories by Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer (University of Iowa Press)

In 2018, The Story Prize received as entries 108 books published by 79 publishers or imprints. We choose the shortlist of three finalists first, then release our longlist a few weeks later because it's difficult to narrow the field down—especially when so many of the books we read are worth a second look. 

Our longlist can only represent a limited number of books and of necessity leaves out dozens of good short story collections. To be sure, not every book we read rises to such a level. Nonetheless, every writer who published a short story collection last year accomplished something significant and deserves an enormous amount of credit.

We'll announce the winner of The Story Prize at an event co-sponsored with The New School's Creative Writing program at the auditorium at 66 W. 12 Street on March 6. At the event, finalists Jamel Brinkley, Deborah Eisenberg, and Lauren Groff will read from and discuss their work. You can buy tickets in advance online or that night at the box office. 

An Index to 2018 Author Posts on The Story Prize blog (The Final Year of These)

Hit Leaders: Broughman and Blakeslee

Last year, for the ninth straight year, we invited every author of a book entered for The Story Prize to contribute a guest post to this blog, and 39 chose to participate. Since 2010, the TSP blog has featured 538 guest posts from 515 different writers (some have contributed in more than one year). Here we are providing an index of the 2018 posts. Links to indexes for 2012-2017 are at the bottom of this post, as are links to the first two years of guest posts, 2010 and 2011.

It's been fun while it lasted, but because of steady declines in both author participation and the audience for these blog posts, 2018 will be the final year of this series. In its place, we hope to offer an opportunity for authors whose books we read in 2019 to contribute an image that relates to their collection, along with a short paragraph or two about the image, that we'll post on The Story Prize Instagram account.

According to Blogger's statistics, most 2018 author guest posts received 250 or more page views, down from an average of 400 last year. The most popular post, Chad V. Broughman on Being a Writer and a Parent, has so far drawn nearly 2,000 page views. Last year's leader, Karen Shepard: How to Make Intermittent and Erratic Progress as a Writer, in Twenty-Eight Easy Steps, had more than 4,500 page views—the sixth most of any TSP blog post, at the time (It is now the fourth most popular post, with almost 7,000 page views). Antonya Nelson's Ten Writing Rules, the post with the most all-time views, currently has well over 14,000 page views.

The 2018 author contribution with the second most hits was Vanessa Blakeslee's Eight Most Anticipated 2018 Story Collections, with close to 1,000 page views to date. The two posts with the largest Facebook reach were Chad V. Broughman's and John Mort on Writing Short Stories and Raising Vegetables.

Here's the index for 2018.

A-B

Camille Acker on an Individualistic Writing Process
Jacob M. Appel's Misguided Advice
Where Do Stories Come from? Ramona Ausubel's Visual Guide
Matthew Baker's Experiments with Language
Karen E. Bender's Advice to a Young Writer: Thoughts on the Structures That Hold up the House of the Story
Thomas Benz: In Defense of Elaboration
Chaya Bhuvaneswar on Writing Under Difficult Conditions
Vanessa Blakeslee's Eight Most Anticipated 2018 Story Collections
Lucy Jane Bledsoe on How Not to Outline a Short Story
Chad V. Broughman on Being a Writer and a Parent

D-K

Jane Delury Asks: Are We There Yet?Peter Donahue Untrues Sentences
Sherrie Flick on Organizing a Book Tour
Elena Georgiou's Letter to a Not-So-Young Writer
Nancy Gerber on Naming Characters
Ryan Habermeyer on (Re)Upholstering a Story
Adrianne Harun's Nine-Part Writing Advice
Ruth Joffre’s Reading Habits
Why Audrey Kalman Reads Mary Oliver in the Morning

L-O

Kimberly Lojewski Writes A Letter to Her Young Self: On the Dangers of Magic Portals, Nyquil, and Renaissance Faire Carnies
Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum on Stargazing and Writing Short Fiction
All Wendell Mayo's Lonely Ones
K.D. Miller Shows Up

Maria Romasco Moore Pairs Stories with Images

John Mort on Writing Short Stories and Raising Vegetables
Scott Nadelson and the Quest for the Right Voice
Scott O'Connor on Embracing Uncertainty

P-S

Victoria Patterson's Letter to Her Beginning Writer Self
Todd Robert Petersen's Pyramid Problems
Niles Reddick on the Business Side of Writing

Jendi Reiter on Choosing Relationships That Support Their Writing
Anjali Sachdeva: In Praise of Old Stories
Two Books That Speak to Jen Silverman
Curtis Sittenfeld's Breakthrough Experience
Nancy Stohlman on the Biggest Mistake Writers Make

U-X

Kem Joy Ukwu: Beyond the Ending
Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer on Having One Foot In and One Foot Out
How Sandra Worsham Finds the Magic Place

Dax Xenos on the Value of Reading the Dictionary

Past indexes of guest posts:
2017
2016
2015
2014
2013
2012

And here are links to the 2010 and 2011 series of blog posts.

Lucy Jane Bledsoe on How Not to Outline a Short Story

In the 39th in a series of posts from authors of 2018 books entered for The Story Prize, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, author of Lava Falls (University of Wisconsin Press), discusses her disorderly writing process.

People love to ask writers if they plan their stories, write outlines, know the endings before they begin. Though some find this question tedious, I enjoy it because I have not yet resolved the answer for myself and always welcome the opportunity to reconsider my process. The truest answer I can give is: um sort of maybe sometimes, but not really.

I’m a fairly tidy person in most parts of my life. I like a neat living space, the piles in my office are squared up to the corners of my desk, and I make lots of lists for all kinds of activities and tasks. I love schedules.

But when it comes to writing stories, I’m completely unable to plan. My process is exceedingly messy. And I think that is exactly why I love doing this work. Writing fiction takes me out of my comfort zone and into an emotional wilderness, where if I pay careful attention, some of the truest, most beautiful, most elegant connections are made.

Leaving the comfort zone

When I try to write an outline—and god knows, I’ve tried so many times because it just seems like this would be a better way to write a story, and certainly a faster way—the relationships among ideas and characters and scenes feel contrived and artificial. I’m forcing links and motivations, rather than discovering them.

I love spending time in geographical wildernesses for the same reason. There’s a purity to the interconnectivity of all living things, and the nonliving environment in which they thrive, when the natural order hasn’t been disturbed. Walking without trails is much harder, but has its rewards, including discovering the complex and true relationships among all the players.

So my writing process is the messiest part of my life. I glimpse a character, a moment, or sometimes just an idea that I want to explore and I set out in pursuit. The irony is that I almost always try to write an outline, or something like an outline. But as I struggle to figure out which scenes need to be included, and in what order, or god forbid plot points, I quite quickly unravel. The good news is that my unraveling often takes the form of me just launching into writing one of the scenes. Once I’m actually writing a scene, I’m not about to stop to go back to the outline. When I get stuck, which of course inevitably happens, I consider the outline again, which usually leads me to writing another scene. After a period of time—and for a short story this can be a few days (when I’m very, very lucky) to more typically a few months, if not a couple of years—I’ll have a bunch of scenes with which I’m happy. I will realize that while I don’t have an outline, I do have a draft.

This is the moment when I get super strict with myself. I have to cut scenes that don’t work or contribute. I have to figure out the order of the scenes. I have to write additional scenes that have become necessary. (This is one of the most difficult steps, adding scenes that I’ve deemed from a more analytical mind need to be added). Next comes the winnowing: examining every paragraph, sentence, and word for ones that should be cut.

But wait, I wrote: Next comes…. As if there’s an order to how I do this. As if I always do it the same way. I wish I knew my process. I wish there were a formula for how it works every time. Instead, my process changes constantly. I’m always discovering new ways of discovering story. But then that’s exactly why I love writing stories because the work is never the same and always surprises me.

John Mort on Writing Short Stories and Raising Vegetables

In the 38th in a series of posts from authors of 2018 books entered for The Story Prize, John Mort, author of Down Along the Piney (University of Notre Dame Press), contemplates the similarities between writing stories and gardening.

I have a long publishing record but have never written anything that could be called commercial. It’s not that I don’t want to. I think everything I’ve written deserves a wide readership, but this has never happened.

Obviously, I don’t write short stories (or novels) to make money. So why, at my age when I’ve nothing to prove, do I bother?

I believe it’s similar to raising vegetables. Writing and gardening are the two things in my life that have held my interest since grade school. Either endeavor is subtle, minute, and impossible to do perfectly. The best you can hope for is to improve.

I own some acres near a Corps of Engineers lake in western Missouri. The topsoil is thin and rocky but still I can raise potatoes, okra, squash, and tomatoes without much augmentation. Sweet corn will hardly grow and anyhow ’possums will raid it. They know to the day when the corn is ripe and eat off the kernels rather neatly without even breaking away the ear.

In the Garden: Battling 'possums

I cut cedar poles and constructed a 25’ x 25’ cage, covered it over with wire, and then built up the soil with manure and mulch. I raised one fine crop of sweet corn, watermelons, and cantaloupes before the ’possums figured out how to breach the wire. I tried to raise corn two more years but couldn’t keep the ’posssums out no matter how many staples I drove.

Pretty silly, this old man in an obscure part of the world, battling ’possums.

I lowered the pH in the soil by bringing in peat and spreading sulfur, and planted blueberries. My cage was already barrier enough to the deer and birds, and ’possums don’t appear to care much for blueberries. I’ve had one good crop and am tripling the number of plants this year, but we’ll see. Some other problem will arise. You never quite get there.

I’m saying: You keep writing despite the ’possums. My ignorance is a ’possum, which I try to overcome through reading. Another ’possum is my despair over the state of publishing. Also, I’ll never be William Faulkner.

Nowadays, I wonder whether I’m too old, too rural, too male to fathom the #MeToo movement. Maybe I’m just irrelevant, so why even try? What in the world is a hashtag?

Norman Mailer held little regard for short story writers—and probably wasn’t much of a gardener, either. Nonetheless, using another, familiar metaphor, he nailed why you do it:

The real short story writer is a jeweler. Like most such craftsmen, he does not—unless knighted by genius, as Hemingway or Faulkner—do much else. No, he stays in his shop, he polishes those jewels, he collects craft, lore, confirms gossip, assays jeweler’s rouge, looks to steal the tricks of the arcane, and generally disports like a medieval alchemist who’s got a little furnace, a small retort, a cave, a handful of fool’s gold, and a mad monk’s will.

Mailer opined that the novelist tries to embrace the entire world, while the short story writer bores inward, perfecting a small universe. And yes, that’s it. You’re seeking perfection, however small its compass. Every time your story is rejected, every time you harvest an apt criticism, you hurry to sharpen an image, embolden a sentence, ferret out a redundancy.

I keep at it, prospecting for gold. I want that sturdy blueberry bush loaded down with fruit, and I want to sell blueberries at my roadside stand. I hope, this time, the world will notice.

Mostly, I fail. But I can’t afford to be depressed because once in a while, I succeed, and then I rejoice. My joy is very nearly religious. I mulched and hoed and raked, and all of a sudden—and not by accident—I dug up the truth.

Nancy Stohlman on the Biggest Mistake Writers Make

In the 37th in a series of posts from authors of 2018 books entered for The Story Prize, Nancy Stohlman, author of Madame Velvet's Cabaret of Oddities (Big Table Publishing), lays out the stages of writing.

It’s not what you think.

The biggest mistake writers make? Not knowing which stage of the writing process they’re in.

We confuse writing with editing, we confuse editing with publication, we show work to others before it’s ready, we hoard work that is ready, afraid of rejection. Realizing which stage of the process you’re in—and more importantly what your work needs at that phase—is crucial.

Stage One: Creative Play

Regardless of genre, true creativity always begins as play. It’s that time of pure inspiration, when your ideas are new and fragile, where risks are taken, mistakes are made and become discoveries. This creative honeymoon is a time of sweetness and acceptance, a private time between you and your work and also when it needs the most protection—it’s raw, vulnerable, full of potential, beautiful to us but the wings aren’t dry yet.

So it’s the worst time to get feedback. The work isn’t ready for scrutiny and neither is the author. But we’ll do it anyway: We throw the baby into the pool thinking it can swim; we invite the paparazzi in before we’re even dressed. We show the world before we’re ready for their reaction, and like a negative exposed to light, all those budding ideas can fade away in front of our eyes.

And then the writer gives up or gets blocked and doesn’t know why.

Stage Two: Puberty

This the true transformation of your work, the metamorphosis, when it discovers itself. The child gets rashes of acne, stretch marks, growing pains, hair in weird places. Sometimes they don’t seem like your baby at all—and they’re not.

We must not love our work too much at this stage, but we must love it enough to be willing to cut it open and lay it all out like a disassembled engine. It’s also the right time to bring in a trusted audience for feedback. The audience should be midwives, peers, teachers, and mentors—those who can tell you your sunglasses are on your head and point out things in your work you’ve become blind to.

The biggest mistake most writers make in this phase? Skipping it.

Yes, because we fear this re-visioning process, we can keep our stories hidden in the dark. But this crucible is where the real magic happens, where your work truly matures.

I recommend working in a new file during this phase. Save that original draft in a separate file and do the surgery elsewhere, far away from the baby you love.

Stage Three: Grown Adult Living in the Basement

And then there’s the third phase, after the honeymoon, after puberty: the grown adult living in the basement phase. This is when we’ve worked on something until it’s done but we can’t let it go. It’s over-gestated, rotting—we can ruin it and stymie our creativity if we stay there too long.

We can get stuck in this phase for lots of good reasons. First, there is the very real possibility of rejection. This creation you’ve worked so hard on is now going to have to make it in the world without you. So, like overprotective parents, we lock it up in the basement “for its own protection.”

There’s another reason we keep our work hostage—we’d rather stay in the “editing” phase indefinitely than face the finality of finishing. Finishing would mean returning the blank page again, and that’s also scary.

But knowing when something is finished is just as important as any other part of the process. When the child is grown, buy them a suitcase. Maybe we let it go and it’s published and that’s fantastic. And maybe it goes nowhere and that’s okay too. But we must move forward.

Staying stuck in any phase robs us of our growth as writers. All creations have their own cycles, their own lifespans and their own destinies. Whatever its destiny, a writer needs to lead it to the ocean, put it in a bottle and set it adrift.

And then, with a fresh mind, turn to Creative Play once again.

Jane Delury Asks: Are We There Yet?

In the 36th in a series of posts from authors of 2018 books entered for The Story Prize, Jane Delury, author of The Balcony (Little, Brown), learns to practice boredom.

As a child growing up in the suburbs of Sacramento, I was often bored, most markedly in the back seat of my father’s Plymouth sedan. Too carsick to read, handheld electronic devices not yet invented, I stared out the window at strip malls and car dealerships, a scenery without distinction or surprise. Telephone poles cranked by. There went another McDonald’s. I twisted in my seat and put my forehead to the window. Eventually, like an immune response, my imagination took over. Buildings melted away into the sun-whipped grasses of the Gold Rush era, caravans of covered wagons lumbering through an intersection. An angel with metal wings circled a shopping mall. The rooftops of a miniature golf course became the skyline of Paris.

Last summer, I was standing in line at a coffee shop across the street from my university office when my phone died. I felt dismayed. The line of people stretched to the door. I might be stuck here for an entire ten minutes. I couldn’t answer emails or texts, read the newspaper, review the edits to a story I’d revised the night before, or figure out dinner. Nothing could be accomplished. To calm my myself, I made a to-do list on a page of my notebook. Later, heading back to my office with the cup of coffee, the ludicrousness hit me. When had boredom become my enemy? And what did this mean for my writing?

My smartphone, I knew, wasn’t the only culprit. My mind itself seemed set to the practical. My imagination was penned in, less apt to crash the fence and roam those invisible hills. My first book had recently been published, and I had spent months answering Q&As, tweeting, smiling, and trying to figure out Instagram. That tornado over, I was back to drafting a new book. For the past few weeks, whenever I sat down to write, I panicked. Now I wondered if my panic was not merely the usual worry that this new book wouldn’t turn out. Maybe I was panicking over boredom itself. I feared a return to the dead and lost hours that my fiction had always required.

Call to action

For the rest of the summer, before I started to write, I practiced boredom. I woke up early and went outside to my garden. I sat in a lawn chair, empty-handed. My mind buzzed. My body revolted. I needed to get off the chair. I needed to move, work on the book, solve the pacing problem in the first chapter, develop that character, figure out that turn, make something happen by noon, get the draft finished by fall. But no. I had to stay still. I had to be bored. Soon, I was. And once my imagination had hatched an escape plan, I went upstairs and got to work.

Half Gods by Akil Kumarasamy Is the Winner of The Story Prize Spotlight Award

Beyond naming three finalists each January, we also present The Story Prize Spotlight Award to a collection of exceptional merit. Selected books can be promising works by first-time authors, collections in alternative formats, or works that demonstrate an unusual perspective on the writer's craft. The award includes a prize of $1,000. 

We're pleased to announce that the winner for books published in 2018 is Half Gods by Akil Kumarasamy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a collection of ten stories set in the U.S. and Sri Lanka that center around a family that has a foot in each world. Although the book references the epic Hindu text the Mahabharata, these beautifully written and shaped stories are firmly grounded in the details of Kumarasamy's characters' everyday lives. 

This is the seventh time we've given out The Story Prize Spotlight Award. The six previous winners are: Drifting House by Krys Lee, Byzantium by Ben Stroud, Praying Drunk by Kyle Minor, Killing and Dying by Adrian Tomine, Him, Me, Muhammad Ali by Randa Jarrar, and Subcortical by Lee Conell. 

Congratulations to Akil Kumarasamy and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for winning The Story Prize Spotlight Award for short story collections published in 2018.

The Story Prize Finalists: Jamel Brinkley, Deborah Eisenberg, and Lauren Groff!

We're pleased to honor as finalists for The Story Prize three outstanding books published in 2018, chosen from 108 entries representing 79 different publishers or imprints. The finalists are:

• A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley (Graywolf Press) 

• Your Duck Is My Duck by Deborah Eisenberg (Ecco) 

• Florida by Lauren Groff (Riverhead Books)

A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley explores complex family bonds and the inescapable consequences of choices made and avoided. The incisive stories in Deborah Eisenberg's Your Duck Is My Duck capture both the gravity and the absurdity of our current predicament. Florida by Lauren Groff uses the Sunshine State as a point of departure, shining a light on the menaces her characters perceive to be lurking in the shadows.

This year's judges—author Jo Ann Beard, Washington Post book critic Walton Muyumba, and bookseller Veronica Santiago Liu—will decide the outcome.

The annual award event will take place at the New School’s Auditorium at 66 West 12 Street in New York City at 7:30 p.m. on Wed., March 6. Tickets cost $14. That night, Brinkley, Eisenberg, and Groff will read from and discuss their work on-stage. At the end of the event, Julie Lindsey will announce the winner and present that author with $20,000 along with an engraved silver bowl. The two runners-up will each receive $5,000. The Creative Writing Program at The New School co-sponsors the event.

In the weeks ahead, we'll announce this year's winner of The Story Prize Spotlight Award. We'll also publish an index of guest posts from 2018 authors and a long list of other exceptional collections we read last year.