An Index of Guest Posts from Authors of 2016 Short Story Collections

Hit parade leaders: Hale (left), Perabo (top right), and Chase (bottom right)

In 2016, for the fifth straight year, we invited each author of a collection we received as an entry for The Story Prize to contribute a guest post to this blog. Out of 106 authors, 68 chose to participate. Since 2010, the TSP blog has featured 452 guest posts from 437 writers (some have contributed in more than one year).

According to Blogger's statistics, most 2016 guest posts received 400 or more page views. The most popular post, "Benjamin Hale's Four Essential Fiction Writing Rules," has so far drawn more than 6,100 page views—the third most of any TSP blog post. "Antonya Nelson's Ten Writing Rules," the post with the most all-time views, currently has more than 14,000 of them.

The author posts with the second and third most hits this year were "Susan Perabo Urges Writers to Stop Thinking About Themselves," with nearly 2,000 page views, and "Katie Chase's Ten Simple Steps to a Short Story Collection," with more than 1,400 page views to date.

When we ask the authors if they'd like to contribute, we give them several options. One is to answer any or all of a series of questions, that we change somewhat each year. The 2016 questions were:

•  Why do you write?
•  Name something you read that made you want to be a writer.
•  Is there a story by another author you wish you’d written?
•  Where does a story begin for you?
•  Describe a physical, mental, or spiritual practice that helps put you in a suitable state of mind to write.
•  What do you do when you get stuck?
•  How do you know when a story you’re in the process of writing is or isn’t working?
•  Describe an unfinished story that you want to go back to but haven’t quite figured out yet.
•  Discuss a local bookstore or library that is important to you.

We also suggested some possible essay topics:

•  A literary touchstone.
•  A letter to a young writer, a la Rilke.
•  A list of ten pieces of writing advice. 

In addition, contributors had the option of coming up with their own ideas.

Here then is this year's index of guest posts, in alphabetical order by last name.

A-B

Kirstin Allio on Reading the Newspaper Before Sitting Down to Write
Kathy Anderson on Beginning with the First Line

Jacob M. Appel's Tips on How to Market Your Short Story Collection(s)
David Atkinson on Not Quite So Stories and Just So Stories
Jensen Beach on the Likability or Unlikability of Characters
Clare Beams' Ten Pieces of Writing Advice
Matt Bell's Aimee Bender Fan Fiction
Patricia D. Benke Says There's No Such Thing As Writer's Block
Brian Booker on Taking Characters for a Ride
Karen Brennan on Fighting to Find Solitude

C-G
Tobias Carroll on Broken Structures and Unfinished Stories
MB Caschetta's Encounters with Grace Paley
Katie Chase's Ten Simple Steps to a Short Story Collection
Matthew Cheney: Why I Am Not a Poet
Jaimee Wriston Colbert's Perfect Writing Day
Serena Crawford's Nine Tips For Authors in Search of Characters
Patrick Dacey's Brief Warning to a Young Writer
Peter Ho Davies on Writing Goals (Literal and Metaphorical)
Helen Ellis: A Writer's Ten Commandments
Louise Ermelino on the Mystery of Becoming a Writer
Dana Fitz Gale on Writing Into the Unknown
Amina Gautier on Loving the Short Story
Gary Gildner Finds Grace
Debbie Graber and the Freedom to Be Foolish
Amy Gustine on the Virtues of Both Virtual and Real Bookstores

H-K
Becky Hagenston Wonders: What If?
Benjamin Hale's Four Essential Fiction Writing Rules
Why Rachel Hall Writes Fiction
Stephanie Han's Ten Points of Fiction Writing Advice
Kevin Hardcastle Says: Nobody Will Really Believe You Can Pull This off
Charley Henley on How Boredom Can Spur Creativity
Arlene Heyman on Dealing with Self-Doubt and Rejection
Dustin M. Hoffman's Letter to A Young Writer (Probably Himself)
Charlotte Holmes on the Importance of Bridging Even the Smallest of Gaps
Vanessa Hua's Ten Writing Pointers
Allegra Hyde: "Act Like an Author, Think Like a Painter"
Greg Jackson Asks: Does Literature Have a Political Responsibility?
Randa Jarrar and the Lonely Voice

L-O
April Ayers Lawson on Why She Writes
Tony Lindsay on Writing to Be Read
Odie Lindsey on Recovering Love in Fiction (Care of a Self-Prompt)
Robert Lopez on Waste and Welter

Sara Majka on Starting to Write Again
Chris McCormick's Sixteen Steps to Writing a Story

Maryse Meijer on the Frivolity and Necessity of Clothing and Books
Matthew Neill Null on "Greatness Strikes Where It Pleases" by Lars Gustafsson

Robert Oldshue on the Probable Improbable in Fiction
Robert Overbey on the Art of Not Being a Dick (or Thinking You're Not)

P-S
Jodi Paloni on Stranger Stories
Susan Perabo Urges Writers to Stop Thinking About Themselves
Mari Reiza Pulls the Strings
Patrick Ryan on How to Begin
Sara Schaff on Art for Our Sake
Why Louise Farmer Smith Writes Short Stories
Maureen Millea Smith on the Lasting Influence of Libraries
Christine Sneed on Personal and Narrative Spaces
Erin Stalcup’s Writing Advice (Not Rules) Mostly Written by Other People
Lynn Stegner's Answer to the Question: "Why Stories?"

T-Y
James Terry Goes Home Again
Johnny Townsend Writes What He Knows
Valerie Trueblood on Eudora Welty's Matchless Book, The Eye of The Story
Zachary Tyler Vickers on Keeping the Reader Engaged
Alexander Weinstein's Letter To Himself as a Young Writer
Theodore Wheeler on Writing Stories from Inside Trump's America (Before It Was)
Paula Whyman's Six Steps to Conquering Your Fear of Sex Scenes
Ronna Wineberg's Ten Rules for Writing a Short Story Collection
Callan Wink on Work and Legitimacy
Melissa Yancy: In Praise of "Bobcat" and the Unruly Story

Past indexes of guest posts:
2015
2014
2013
2012

Patrick Ryan on How to Begin

In the 68th in a series of posts on 2016 books entered for The Story Prize, Patrick Ryan, author of The Dream Life of Astronauts (Dial Press), discusses his approach to writing the opening of a story.

How I wish I’d written “Chef’s House” by Raymond Carver. Actually, that’s too greedy and grandiose. All I really want is to live one day of my life as the person who, that morning, wrote the opening to “Chef’s House.” That first paragraph!* We get it all in just a few lines: the present of those two characters, their history, their heartbreak, their hope. We get the urgency, the hesitation, the tone, the sound of their voices. We even get in microcosm the entire arc of the story that’s to come—though we aren’t sure that’s the case until we’ve finished reading.

I don’t find beginnings any harder to write than endings. Or middles, for that matter. But I have settled into a few guidelines for myself when it comes to beginnings. I try to start with a sentence you can’t really argue with. Meaning, a sentence that states a fact within the world of the story. And I endeavor to make that sentence involve an action—though that’s not always possible. It’s very helpful for the writer and the reader to get to a verb that has to do with the present action of the story as soon as possible.

Revising the first page is an ongoing process. If I write four sentences, chances are I’ve already revised each one of them a few times before I get up from my chair. I read out loud to myself all the time, listening to the way the words line up. I do that for a couple of reasons: I want the rhythm to work from one sentence to the next, and I want to clear away any confusion. Nothing that can be read two different ways is allowed to stand. (The only exception to that, of course, is dialogue. Miscommunication between characters often serves as the gasoline in a scene’s engine.) Anytime a writer sets out to be obscure—even for a line or two—I think it’s a misstep. Anything that causes the reader to pause, back up, and reread for clarity is a misstep. Writers should only count on getting one read out a reader.

A strong sense of character has to be in place for me before I can get going. I know there are plenty of great writers who start with a few words, add a few more, and before they know it, characters and situations emerge on the page. For me, nothing emerges without a grasp on the characters I’m writing about before I begin. I don’t take a lot of notes on them or sketch out their bios as a rule, but I think about them. I picture them. I don’t need an exact face; I need an exact sense.

All of that is there in the opening of “Chef’s House.” I’m in awe every time I read it. I’ll never knock an opening out of the park like that, but a person can dream, right?

___________________________________________________

* The opening to "Chef's House" by Raymond Carver: 

That summer Wes rented a furnished house north of Eureka from a recovered alcoholic named Chef. Then he called to ask me to forget what I had going and to move up there and live with him. He said he was on the wagon. I knew about that wagon. But he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He called again and said, Edna, you can see the ocean from the front window. You can smell salt in the air. I listened to him talk. He didn’t slur his words. I said, I’ll think about it. And I did. A week later he called again and said, Are you coming? I said I was still thinking. He said, We’ll start over. I said, If I come up there, I want you to do something for me. Name it, Wes said. I said, I want you to try and be the Wes I used to know. The old Wes. The Wes I married. Wes began to cry, but I took it as a sign of his good intentions. So I said, All right, I’ll come up.

Matt Bell's Aimee Bender Fan Fiction

In the 67th in a series of posts on 2016 books entered for The Story Prize, Matt Bell, author of A Tree or a Person or a Wall (Soho Press), explains why he left a story out of his collection.

There are thirteen stories in How They Were Found, my first story collection, but only nine of them made it to A Tree or a Person or a Wall, my latest, which includes most of that out-of-print book as well as a previously published novella and a number of new stories. Of the four stories left out, three were easy and obvious exclusions. Two very short stories would have been swallowed up in the nearly four hundred pages of A Tree or a Person or a Wall. Another was among the earliest stories I wrote for How They Were Found, and it no longer seemed strong enough to stand beside the stories that followed.

The fourth was titled "The Leftover," and it was one of my favorites.

A breakup story, "The Leftover" concerned a young woman whose boyfriend moved out—but who somehow left behind a smaller, childlike version of himself who the woman now had to care for. There was a sweetness to the story that I always liked, a tenderness often absent from other stories of mine, and I think it was funny in its absurdity in a way that made it a valuable addition to How They Were Found, an often grim collection. But by the time I was putting together A Tree or a Person or a Wall, I knew I couldn't include it again.

The problem? Rereading the "The Leftover" meant admitting it didn't really feel like it was mine but Aimee Bender's.

Or rather: what it felt like was a piece of Aimee Bender fan fiction. The events of the story could have come right out of one of her books—which isn't to say I'd rendered them as well as she would have. (Another hallmark of fan fiction: The writing and the invention are rarely as good as the original.) It had enough markers of what I think of as "my style" to stand alone if I never said anything, but obviously it owed an enormous debt to Bender, her worlds, her style. Reading my story again with fresh eyes, it was hard for me to feel that I'd added enough to what I'd taken to really call it mine.

So I decided "The Leftover" was fan fiction—but was that necessarily a bad thing? "Fan fiction" can be a term of derision: The form isn't exactly beloved by most literary writers, and certainly most creative writing teachers see it as part of their job to encourage students away from it, even though many beginning students are in writing classes because of their love for fan fiction—writing inside the worlds of their heroes is not infrequently the only kind of fiction they've written so far. And why not? In her book On Beauty, Elaine Scarry says that "Beauty brings copies of itself into being… Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to resemblances and still other times to things whose connection to the original site of inspiration is unrecognizable."

Around the time I wrote "The Leftover," there were few writers whose work I loved as much as I loved Aimee Bender's stories. They were smart and funny and weird, and though I didn't yet have the technical language to describe all of their effects, there were techniques she used that rang deeply true to my own felt experience of the world. For instance, there's often a "flatness" to her depictions of action that (thanks to Kate Bernheimer's writing) I've learned to recognize in other kinds of non-realist writing like fairy tales, and I loved how concrete the magic in Bender's stories was, how she never winked at the reader or flinched from the consequences of introducing some unlikely new reality into the world we know. But as much I liked these elements of Bender's writing, I hadn't yet taken what I learned and made it fully my own, at least not in "The Leftover," where what I'd taken from Bender is now so much more apparent to me than it is in other stories of mine, which surely also bear her influence in less obvious ways.

(A side note: Could there be any more obvious title for a story of fan fiction than "The Leftover"? A story literally made as if from the scraps of a better story, "reheated" by the imagination of a writer who had fond memories of some fresher original?)

Part of the problem of "The Leftover" and Bender's total influence on it is easy for me to diagnose now: I just hadn't read enough other books like hers yet, books working in the same traditions that would expand and complicate my fandom until I could see more of the possibilities of this kind of fabulist writing. I needed Karen Russell, I needed Kelly Link, I needed Karin Tidbeck, I needed Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Marquez and dozens of other fabulists, magical realists, writers of contemporary fairy tales and myths.

To more fully become my own writer, I needed as many of these kinds of writers as I could find, and however many I read it will never be enough.

One of the truest things I've learned about writing fiction is that the writers who seem the most original are often paradoxically the ones with the most influences. They read from the most eras, from the most traditions. They love writers not just from America but from around the world. They read diversely, in every sense of the word. And all their fandoms combine into something seemingly new, some composite "imagination" not yet seen, which makes them seem utterly unique. But perhaps that's not really it: Perhaps these most original writers are simply better fan fiction writers than the rest of us, because the beauty they're imitating comes from more sources, because they have learned to drawn upon the example of not just one way of seeing the world but many.

I know now that every sentence I write is, in one way or another, a love letter to a sentence I've read, a fan fiction in miniature. Still, I removed "The Leftover" from my newest book because it was too obviously an overt love letter to only Aimee Bender—to what I understood about Bender's sentences, her techniques, her preferred story shapes. It was too simple an affection, too obviously a mimicry. Since then, a lot of other writers have come into my life through their books, each unique in his or her own way, each offering some slightly skewed way of looking at this world we share. I fall in love with a new writer, and each new love leaves its mark, hopefully joining all the others that have come before to share what's best of their art with whatever is most mine in me, their stories making new tales through me, as best as we all can.

Tobias Carroll on Broken Structures and Unfinished Stories

In the 66th in a series of posts on 2016 books entered for The Story Prize, Tobias Carroll, author of Transitory (Civil Coping Mechanisms), talks about trying to make use of an admired and complex story structure.

When I was young, I subscribed to OMNI magazine mostly for the science fiction stories that accompanied articles about technology and the future in each issue. And while I don’t remember every story that I read in my high school years, a few have stayed seared into my mind: Ted Chiang’s “Tower of Babylon,” with its reimagining of a familiar story in an entirely fresh form; Jonathan Lethem’s “The Happy Man,” for its jarring blend of a surreal cosmology and quotidian realism; and Harlan Ellison’s “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore,” for a number of reasons related to both its structure and the narrative that slowly unfolds.

What struck me about it then, and still does, is the way in which it establishes a very rigid structure, and then thoroughly dynamites it. Several stories are nestled within this story. Each paragraph begins with a sentence with the same structure: “On [day of the week] the [date] of [month].” In each, the protagonist, a man known as Levendis, carries out a particular action—some of them innocuous, some heroic, some horrific. It quickly establishes Levendis as someone with miraculous abilities: he can easily traverse time and space, and each day’s events are unique: a story within the stories that make up the larger story.

By the end of “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore,” Ellison defies the structure he established earlier, however. It begins with events taking place on the first of October; given its structure, one might expect the story to end on the 31st. It does not; it goes beyond that, treating the framework as one more boundary to transcend—all of which makes for a neat evocation of Levandis’ own ability to leap around the corridors of space and time, as well as an echo of the playful way in which he does so. It’s a hypnotic feat: Ellison established a particular rhythm, and then dismantled it, propelling the reader into the full-on unknown along the way.

***

Clearly, I wanted to try my hand at something that took a similar approach. So far, I haven’t been able to accomplish this. I have a story in progress that would follow a character as they carried out a series of tasks at the rest areas on the Garden State Parkway–partially because, as someone who grew up in New Jersey, rest areas are inexorably wrapped up in my memories of long car trips, and partially because, as spaces go, they fascinate me.

But I haven’t quite found the right way to pull this off yet. There’s a confidence and bravado in Ellison’s story that makes the risks in his structure pay off. And there’s the fact that he uses the repetitive aspects of his structure to counterbalance the more sprawling aspects of it. A narrative that covered similar ground—which could literally be set in an infinite number of locations and an infinite number of points in time—is ultimately given a kind of unity through this device. Remove that scaffolding and the disparate elements might become discordant. Leave it in and there’s a sense of comfort: the reader’s anticipation of what Levandis might do on the next day, and on the day after that.

What makes Ellison’s story work so well is its juxtaposition of rigidity and playfulness—which eventually folds back in on itself as it reaches its conclusion. It’s a work of fiction from which I’m still drawing lessons, and one to which I hope to eventually find the right way to pay homage. “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore” is a fascinating story to revisit and study, though its balance of formality and irreverence seems unique. Still, it’s a short story that contains worlds within it, and closes with a gleeful wink. It’s hard to avoid being impressed, and I’ll most likely be chasing aspects of its structure for years to come.

Theodore Wheeler on Writing Stories from Inside Trump's America (Before It Was)

In the 65th in a series of posts on 2016 books entered for The Story Prize, Theodore Wheeler, author of Bad Faith (Queen's Ferry Press), reexamines his story collection in light of recent events.

As part of my literary citizenship here in Omaha, I co-host a literature-themed pub quiz at a Midtown nightspot called Pageturners Lounge. It’s a good chance to come together with friends and hear various folks from the community who we invite to talk about their books or small press or the local library. Our event in November fell the day after the election, something that seemed fortuitous at first. Who wouldn’t want to put all that nastiness behind them and tilt a few pints in honor of the nation (hopefully) going on about its business in a quiet and dignified manner? Or not. 

Being good citizens, we showed up ready to give our best to the event, though the proceedings were decidedly low-energy. Only about a fifth of our typical crowd showed, and half the teams featured the word “sad” in their usually-cheeky team names. (For example, Big Trouble in Little Vagina was a crowd favorite the previous month). Safe to say, it wasn’t our best night. However, given the small crowd, the occasion did allow for reflection and conversation. 

As it happened, that particular Wednesday turned out to be much more roiling than many of us expected. Only about a fifth of our typical crowd showed, and half the teams featured the word “sad” in their usually-cheeky team names. (For example, Big Trouble in Little Vagina was a crowd favorite the previous month). Safe to say, it wasn’t our best night. However, the occasion did allow for reflection and conversation. 

At some point in the night, one of my compatriots noted that Bad Faith, my short story collection, could be billed as an exploration of “Trump’s America.” To many, the phrase must provoke an image of unemployed white men whose political views center on xenophobia. That’s definitely not how I see myself—I’m employed! I don’t shout hate speech!—but now that Trump had won, would it mean that all the U.S. was Trump’s America? And, in a more personal way, have I always been writing from this place and about these people, however you want to label them? Would that also change now that the presidency might go in unprecedented directions?

Omaha's Pageturners Lounge: A sad crowd gathers

In some ways I could see where my friend was coming from. Many of my stories feature rural, rough-edged types who fill the outline of a Trump voter that’s been iterated in the media. My fiction has fit under other labels in the past—rural noir, prairie gothic, dirty realism, etc.—all both dissatisfying and appropriate. Given that I spent years with these characters, digging deep to reveal and refine their natures to the core, I tend to resist thinking about them in demographic terms. On the other hand, with all the talk of recounts and Electoral College shenanigans, maybe it’s worthwhile to think about my characters in this way too, even with the book out. Times change, so why shouldn’t the way I see my book change, too?

Going off my friend’s suggestion, I began to think about who fit into what electoral bucket. Certainly the crotchety Harry Kleinhardt of my opening story, a man who’s forced to face his disappointment of a son while dying from cancer, who spends his afternoons sunning himself in the mudroom listening to Limbaugh and reminisces about how bright life once was, at least before it all went to shit. There’s one vanguard of Trump’s America. Then there’s Anna from “Impertinent, Triumphant,” who met her politician husband while both were congressional interns for Kit Bond, the former Republican Senator from Missouri. It’s easy to see how Anna would coalesce behind the Trump campaign. While not a “build that wall” kind of gal, she wouldn’t be opposed to chanting “lock her up” if others were doing so, say, on the floor of the Republican National Convention, exchanging a loftier political ideal or two in order to take a pantsuit-wearing liberal down a peg.

But there’s some noise in the populous of Bad Faith—as with anywhere, the distance between perception and reality isn’t so clear. Sam and Jacq, also from “Impertinent,” a former travel entrepreneur and an experimental landscape artist, leave Manhattan to settle on a ranch near the Sandhills. And what about the biracial man from Omaha who has to face his fear of being an outsider in a small town (and being exposed to small town police) to attend the funeral of his estranged white mother?

Tallying my characters’ likely votes, I found the Bad Faith results to be remarkably similar to those from November 8. Trump won by a margin of 50%-38% among my characters, compared to his 60%-34% margin in Nebraska this year. About 30% of my characters wouldn’t vote at all, which nearly exactly hits the 29% of Nebraskans who didn’t vote. If the statistics are to be believed, I was writing from inside Trump’s America all along— the only slight error being a 10% underestimate of the president-elect’s support here.

The numbers themselves don’t matter so much, of course. The calculus is too complex for either statistical example to hold much worth beyond the referential. In the end, it’s Nate Silver’s job to make sense of the macro; it’s the fiction writer’s job, in particular an author of short stories, to dissect the micro. While some characters in Bad Faith fit the stereotypical Trump voter, nearly as many in the aggregate flee from deep-red counties or are unaffiliated misfits who live in ways that are beyond a pollster’s imagination. I don’t know if that makes me a chronicler of Trump’s America. But maybe it offers some evidence that the culmination of microscopic details do in the end form a clearer portrait of a certain place in a certain time.

Benjamin Hale's Four Essential Fiction Writing Rules

In the 64th in a series of posts on 2016 books entered for The Story Prize, Benjamin Hale, author of The Fat Artist (Simon & Schuster), focuses on some basic approaches to making stories.

I set out to write a ten-rules-of-writing-fiction essay á la Elmore Leonard, but I only came up with four essential ones. (I have quite a few more after these, but that’s under the “advanced” menu.) These are four basic rules that I give myself when I write fiction, and they work for me.

1. Don’t write disingenuously.

I have many opinions on the art and science of writing fiction, but the foundation they all rest upon is this commandment: Write what would give you, as a reader, pleasure to read.

Questions arise. What gives me, as a reader, pleasure? What is literary pleasure? There are simple pleasures and there are complex pleasures. There are immediate pleasures and there are pleasures a reader must work for, and oftentimes are more pleasurable in the end because of the work done. There are pleasures I know, and I revisit them again and again: the stories of John Cheever, Patricia Highsmith, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Flannery O’Connor, to name a few examples. The only way I have of discovering new varieties of pleasure is to keep on reading, as widely as I can, and in the spirit of exploration: contemporary literature, ancient literature, “high” and “low” literature, literature from as many languages and cultures and times as have left stories behind. The more new pleasures a reader finds, the more techniques of producing literary pleasure that reader as a writer can incorporate into his or her own work.

Do not ever write for someone else’s idea of pleasure. This pitfall is harder to avoid than it seems at first. One might think, Well, The New Yorker seems to like stories that do so-and-so, so I will try to write a story that does that. Or, x writer won x prize, or y writer got an advance for infuriating sum of money z for her book, so I will try to write a book like that. If one drop of this horrible substance falls onto your page, it will contaminate it. If it does, then you are now writing disingenuously; you are writing (as Sinclair Lewis put it in his letter rejecting the Pulitzer in 1926) “not for inherent excellence but for alien rewards.” Don’t write for extrinsic praise. Don’t write for critics. Don’t write for scholars. Don’t write for writers. Don’t write for a “readership,” or an “ideal reader.” Simply try to write what you, as a reader, would honestly find pleasure in.

2. When experience and imagination fail you, research.

There are, as far as I can discern, three sources of inspiration for any maker of stories: (1) experience, (2) research, and (3) imagination.

Experience is everything that you as a human being have learned, thought, seen, touched, smelled, tasted, heard, felt, observed, and remember. I happen to know what an unseasonably early snowfall on an aspen grove on a mountainside in Colorado looks like, what it feels like to be held at gunpoint by robbers, the curiously bizarre smell of the penguin enclosure at the Denver Zoo, moral shame, romantic obsession, and heartbreak so brutal it feels life-threatening (at first)—among other things. These are things I can use in my writing because I have experienced them firsthand.

When a story forces me to write about things I have not experienced firsthand is where research comes in. What it feels like to be a chimpanzee. What it smells like on a fishing boat. What it feels like to have a brain tumor. What it feels like to breastfeed a baby. What a drag queen might have observed at a rooftop cocktail party in New York City in May of 1981. Research can involve reading lots of books about chimpanzees, reading memoirs written by people who have survived brain tumors, asking someone who has breastfed a baby to describe it, interviewing a retired drag queen, calling up a commercial fishing company and asking if they mind if I stand on their boat and try to stay out of the way while they work, so that I can take mental notes on what I see, smell, and hear as they haul in their first catch of the morning. Almost anyone—mothers, drag queens, fishermen—will be enthusiastically receptive to a phone call from a fiction writer politely asking what it feels like to do what they do, or have done. The world is pretty big, and the work of writing fiction does not have to be confined to the surface of your desk, or the walls of whatever room you write in. If a story steers you toward the task of rendering something in words that you have not personally experienced, find someone who has experienced that thing, and ask him or her about it.  Most people will be delighted to tell you.

Old salt: Imagination setting sail

Then, take (1) experience, and (2) research, and mix these with (3) imagination. No one on earth will be able to tell you what it feels like to be a chimpanzee in a zoo, so if that’s what you’re writing about, after reading lots of books about chimpanzees, at some point you’re just going to have to plunge into dark territory and imagine it. You can read a lot of books—histories, journals, diaries, and so on—trying to get a sense of what it felt like to be a Scottish sailor in the Royal Navy onboard a ship in the Atlantic on a sunny day in the eighteenth century (I have not finished that particular story yet), but at some point you’ll have to put your imagination in the driver’s seat. If imagination fails you, return to experience or research, and begin again.

3. Structure is crucial.

The single most useful tool anyone has ever given me to go about the craft of storytelling is a technique the writer William Melvin Kelly taught me sixteen years ago. Here it is:

First, tell your story in three sentences.  Beginning, middle, and end.  Then, break those three sentences into nine:

1.) The beginning of the beginning.
2.) The middle of the beginning.
3.) The end of the beginning.

4.) The beginning of the middle.
5.) The middle of the middle.
6.) The end of the middle.

7.) The beginning of the end.
8.) The middle of the end.
9.) The end of the end.

Once you’ve got that down, you now have an outline. The novelist Edward Carey told me (and I think he’s right): “Very few stories that get finished haven’t been outlined at some point.”

In the years after he taught it to me, I have tweaked Willy Kelly’s nine-sentence method somewhat to suit my purposes. I make a nine-box visual outline for every story I write (that actually gets finished*). It’s similar to the storyboarding method screenwriters often use. I go through four or five drafts, and when I’m done it looks like this:

All those letters represent little notes—plot points or bits of information the reader needs to go on into the next box. With this outline, I’ve got the story blocked out into nine “boxes”—or “chapters,” or chunks of narrative; then I’m ready to begin the sentence-by-sentence composition of the story. If I start with box #1, I’ll sit down to write, and tell myself, “You can shoot off into whatever tangents or spandrels you want, describe all the bathtubs and bird feeders and so on that come to you at the moment of putting words on the page (knowing that much of that will get cut later), but whatever you write, you must make happen or convey a, b, and c plot points or data points before moving on to box #2.” And then, when all the actions or bits of information necessary to the story have happened or have been revealed, it’s time to move on to the next box. I follow the boxes until I’ve come to the end of my first draft. Then it’s time for the fun part—revision.

This method builds a three-act structure into a story, and it helps me construct a story horizontally, rather than vertically. It allows a story to expand from inside-out, reaching outward from its center like the branches of a tree. Most importantly, it builds structure into a story. If you don’t think structure is important in storytelling, just listen to someone tell a joke badly: A bad joke-teller forgets to plant information at the right time, and has to backtrack—“No, no, wait, I forgot to tell you…”—and by then, the timing is ruined; the moment is lost, unrecoverable.

Sometimes, of course, it happens that in the process of writing the sentences, I think of something I like better than what I had planned in the outline. That just means I have to go back to the outline and fiddle around with things. The carpenter, in nailing the planks and boards together, has noticed something that did not occur to the architect, so he informs the architect, and the architect tweaks the design. Another metaphor I find useful is that of the composer and the musician. Not so much a classical composer, but a jazz composer, who allows his musicians more leeway for improvisation. There is a vital interplay between the two. The composer needs the musician to play the notes, but the musician who thinks he doesn’t need the composer is just noodling.

4. Write your first drafts by hand.

Again, I’m not saying these “rules” are anything but what I have found works for me. When I write by hand, I don’t get stalled trying to think of exactly the right word—I just leave a blank there, promise myself to reencounter that little problem in the future, and move on with the story. Later, when I’m typing up what I’ve written by hand, I stop and think of what that missing word should be, I experiment with restructuring the grammar of my sentences, I take things out and put things in, and so on: In typing it up, I create my second draft. Some writer, I can’t remember who, said about the subject of what to do on those doldrums days when one doesn’t feel much like writing: “When the fish aren’t biting, I mend the nets.” While writing a first draft, if I am able to stay significantly ahead of myself with the handwritten manuscript, then I’ll always have nets to mend on those days when the fish aren’t biting. Also, writing by hand will keep you away from the Internet, which is absolutely crucial in writing a first draft.

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*A few months ago, I was talking on a panel about short stories at a writers’ conference. I told them about my rule of nines, and someone in the audience asked me, “Do you always use this method to outline stories?” I thought about it, and said, “No. I use this method to outline all the stories that get finished. The stories that dribble and drool and eventually dither out into nothing after meandering for a hundred pages—those are invariably the ones that haven’t been outlined in this way, and they never actually get finished.”

Jaimee Wriston Colbert's Perfect Writing Day

In the 63rd in a series of posts on 2016 books entered for The Story Prize, Jaimee Wriston Colbert, author of Wild Things (BkMk Press), lays out the ideal conditions.

The perfect writing day...

...would not be today, with the fall semester just ended and the grading piled up, and the student requests for recommendation letters pouring in, graduate novels to read over break. Break? What break? The holidays? As a fiction writing professor you shrink away from the mistletoe, the yuletide greetings, please don’t buy me anything because I have no time to return the kindness. You remind yourself over and over that this was the job you dreamed of, worked half a lifetime to get. Creative Writing Professor! Which is true, and you are glad for it. Tell yourself this. Teaching is inspiration.

But the perfect writing day cannot happen while thus-employed. You dream of summer…waking up to the good rich scent of coffee after a refreshing night’s sleep with gorgeous dreams, or maybe no dreams, just that lovely feeling of immersive sleeeeepppp. The coffee magically appears at your bedside, along with some sort of delicious breakfast; maybe these are transported to you on a drone, a hovercraft of some sort, humming up the stairs—Meet George Jenson!—because in your perfect writing day nobody else is at home. Repeat—family members, spouse, poof! All have disappeared into their own lives outside your house; only the cats may remain.

Coffee? Give me a break

Well-nourished and caffeinated you head to your den, your desk beside the window where outside is the long green stretch of your yard leading down to the river; and how about we part that curtain of trees for the day so you can actually see the river, water is inspiration. Now let the ocean appear in your memories of it, growing up on Kailua beach, words pouring forth onto the page forming themselves into poignant, inspired stories. Except you’ve been working on a novel—so scratch the stories for now, let the hovercraft bear them to some magical place where all your small creative moments are translated into images and ideas of vast humanitarian importance, saved for you when next you need such gravitas.

The novel! On your perfect writing day you would not waste these hours in the usual panic, at how can you possibly write a novel in just three short months, until the academic year begins again. You do it, brilliantly, and when you grow tired the hovercraft serves you tea, with an avocado, kale and salmon salad (wild salmon flown in fresh from Alaska!), and a glass of chilled chardonnay. Wine is inspiration. Outside your window, fox pups are playing and birds are singing and the neighbor’s dogs, with their incessant barking are sucked back into their house—safely, you are an animal lover after all, even if these dogs drive you crazy—and the other neighbors’ power tools, leaf blowers, lawnmowers, all of those whiny suburban implements run out of electricity, gas, and the cars, motorcycles, semis roaring down the highway, helicopters beating overhead, all noises and distractions disappear as you step into the world of your novel for six gorgeous hours that belong only to you. Silence is inspiration.

Okay, maybe you are dreaming, after all, your need for silence, your yearning for it: how to be alone with your characters in a world of constant commotion? So what is the perfect writing day? We covet retreats where what we do is validated by the care others give us while we do it, our writing. But let’s face it, that’s the rarefied experience, highly competitive and mostly exclusive. For many of us, it’s while serving pie in a diner, pouring coffee, rotating tires, changing the oil, schlepping kids to this and that, mopping up their messes—and suddenly language is alive within us. Maybe the perfect writing day is in our heads, biking on a trail, taking out the garbage, waiting at a red light and we listen to our characters tell us their lives.

In the Dec. 9 edition of The New York Times, Nia Vardalos, who is acting in a show based on Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things, talks about how back when Strayed was a struggling writer, she “walked around for weeks, asking friends, should I do it? Should I not do it?” Ultimately, of course, she did it. Perhaps the perfect writing day is when we make that decision above all else: Yes, despite all of life’s challenges, disappointments, and distractions, the perpetual noise of being alive, I will hold this one thing, precious! Inspiration is doing it.

Odie Lindsey on Recovering Love in Fiction (Care of a Self-Prompt)

In the 62nd in a series of posts on 2016 books entered for The Story Prize, Odie Lindsey, author of We Come to Our Senses (W.W. Norton), talks about anger, disbelief, and the struggle to maintain empathy in his writing.

At Vanderbilt, I have the privilege of teaching fiction to future physicians and social scientists, asking them to empathize with bodies and circumstances often beyond their, our, bubble. At the public high school where I led a recent workshop, it was a gift to challenge young writers to imagine acts of compassion by individuals they despise. During my own readings and panels, when asked if it is appropriate for me to write about female soldiers, or queer soldiers—groups to which I do not belong—my answer is that I’m not sure; that I welcome critique and criticism, and am thankful for the discussion; that I am committed to mindfulness, and craft, and to stories not being told, to the best of my way-limited ability.

I am immersed in calls to, or questions of, empathy. Yet I’m having a hell of a time finding it in my new fiction. Right now, post-election, 2016, I am overwhelmed by fury. I am sick with disbelief.

I’ve taken to looking backwards, auditing the process of writing my story collection, a consideration of southern veterans and war-culture. The book is girded by twin objectives: to bring forth narratives of nontraditional soldiers, and/or to explore, if not explode, the militarized, masculinized South that would rear boys for battle but deny the disaster of their postwar lives. The latter—part satire, part too-apparent polemic—was inspired by my own combat deployment, 1991, and by the emotional tsunami that hit me 12 years later, as I watched another generation be sent to the same fight…knowing their homecoming would be far worse than mine.

Most pivotal, if only a glint in those pages, was love. Is love. I love my characters—even the worst of them. I love my culture—even when uppercutting it. I was taught that as a storyteller, my obligation was to seek difficult, complicated truths, charging past rote ideal and assumption, and into the intimate mess of humanity. To quote a former teacher, Barry Hannah, pursuing anything else was a “coffee shop skill.”

Only now, I can’t find that love. That mess. My latest fits of fiction import nothing more than rage, or resignation. They are one-liners at best. Lonely.

Only yesterday, I read a New York Times review of a book that dismisses empathy as unreliable, as bullshit. The Right Now Me can dig it.

Only yesterday, I re-read a section of Strength to Love, in which MLK asks: “Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies–or else?”

This morning, I chose “or else.” Though when it comes to fiction-as-in-life, the quote at least raised a process question: how to both fight and love?

I have known the answer, but I can’t recover it. This morning, I can only muster a concept, a claim, a prompt for me, the selfish little squat taking advantage of an invitation to post his thoughts on storytelling: the characters you do unto in their role as others, are in fact a doing unto of yourself. When your fiction seeks the vile and beautiful, the frail and fraught, even nurturing the pigs and monsters, you are in effect revealing your messes to your neighbors, your loves, and your enemies alike, welcoming them to trust, to invest, to critique…and to perhaps nurture their own emotional messes. To fight. To love. To be un-alone.

So get back after it, pal—or else.

Karen Brennan on Fighting to Find Solitude

In the 61st in a series of posts on 2016 books entered for The Story Prize, Karen Brennan, author of Monsters (Four Way Books), discusses how difficult in today's world it is to avoid distractions.

I grew up in a world without cell phones and Internet. A calm world of family TV shows and mailmen. Long distance phone calls were exorbitant and so keeping in daily touch across state—or country—lines was not always an option. We didn’t know much and our lives were full of space. Likewise, time unspooled more like a meander in the woods than like an arrow zinging us to the next thing.

I used to write stories at my grandfather’s desk with a black number two pencil—I loved those pencils. They came in a box and were stored in the desk drawer. I wrote on a small yellow lined legal pad situated on top of a green blotter that protected the polished mahogany desk of my grandfather. My legs, not quite reaching the floor, dangled. Who knows what I was writing? In the silence of the room, the sun pouring in the tall window to my left, the window overlooking the driveway and the street, the calm suburban street with its big houses close to the road and its gardens, with old maples and oaks and big pine trees shading them, I remember exploring my cave of mind for “ideas.” I was alone, as they say, with my thoughts.

Solitude is not a given in my life anymore. Every day, my computer screen is crammed with visual tags that lure me through their portals, the relevant and irrelevant, the trivial and the tragic sharing screen space that more and more resembles my vanishing tabula rasa (the child star at 50, the fire that kills 46, an Anthropologie ad featuring shoes I might like, the president-elect’s twitter feed, the seven signs of impending stroke).

If I want to be a good writer, I need to fight for my solitude—which is to say I need to wipe the slate of my mind clean of distractions, to make space for reflection and imagination. If I miss anything from those narrow-minded, poorly informed days of my past, it would be that time hunched and scribbling over my pages, that time of staring aimlessly out of windows, waiting for the next word or scene or the tiniest nudge from the invisible muses…or pacing, incommunicado, in the silence of a room or insisting on a nap at 11a.m. or feeling the need of a solitary walk around the park.

Albert Einstein: “[T]he monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.”

Aldous Huxley: “The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline toward the religion of solitude.”

Henry David Thoreau: “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

It must have been in the spirit of such companionable solitude that Virginia Woolf writes in her A Writer's Diary passages such as the following:

A disgraceful fact—I am writing this at 10 in the morning in bed in the little room looking into the garden, the sun beaming steady, the wine leaves transparent green, and the leaves of the apple tree so brilliant that, as I had my breakfast, I invented a little story about a man who wrote a poem, I think, comparing them with diamonds and the spiders’ webs, (which glance and disappear astonishingly) with something or other else; which led me to think of Marvell on a country life, so to Herrick and the reflection that much of it was dependent on the town and gaiety—

I choose this passage, quite randomly, from Woolf’s diary because as with many of her entries it so beautifully expresses that blessed quality of the solitary scavenging mind, the imagination on its journey through time and space, the neurons' unimpeded travel, sparking synapses, the ideas and images that are the material of any writer’s best work.

If I want to have a shot at my best work, I will carve my solitude at the expense of other things—things I have to shut down and turn off and get away from. “That other loneliness, “as our great reclusive genius Emily Dickinson calls solitude, is un-countably rich for all of us who are blessed with it:

There is another Loneliness
That many die without
Not want or friend occasions it
Or circumstances or lot

But nature sometimes, sometimes thought
And whoso it befall
Is richer than could be divulged
By mortal numeral

Dustin M. Hoffman's Letter to A Young Writer (Probably Himself)

In the 60th in a series of posts on 2016 books entered for The Story Prize, Dustin M. Hoffman, author of One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (University of Nebraska Press), gives himself a pep talk.

Dear Doubt,
Dear Young Writer,
That is: Dear Young Writer Who Is Probably Me,
That is: Dear Doubt, Embarrassment, Anxiety,

Not much has changed, I suppose, from that first workshop story. The doubt and embarrassment shadows you and will continue. To be a writer is to question your purpose, your prose, your themes, your commas. To be a writer is to doubt and to delete adjectives. Even writing this now, I hesitate to spill advice. But I urge you to build confidence in your gaping doubt. That dark pit will house your foundation. I worry much more about you, young writer who is probably me, when you’re sure and blustering and building stories atop sand. Confidence happens rarely for you, I know, and here I am stealing those grains.

Listen and be humble and be obsessed with writers better than you. There will always be more of them than you’ll ever have time to read, and that’s a shame worth embracing. Compare yourself to the world and find yourself small. That smallness allows you to explore the crannies where tiny truths may have slipped. These tiny truths are much more interesting than the boulders you try to heft on your shoulder when you scratch maudlin poetry on notebook paper, when you turn those angst-filled ambiguities into end-rhyming song lyrics of protest in your punk-rock band. Eventually, young writer who is probably me, you’ll find a small truth hiding, and you’ll write a story about a drywaller you used to work with. You’ll be scared to write that story that doesn’t seem meaningful enough, because it isn’t death or love or revolution or madness. Your story is merely work, merely that living you make and try to forget so you can make big bleeding art.

Putting up drywall: The shape of truth

Listen to the teacher who tells you that drywaller is worth writing about, the drywaller who was your friend when you worked construction, a job that was the opposite of art, of those hulking-with-purpose punk rock songs and obtuse poems. In the corner of that drywaller’s mud pan, behind the dried mud, you might find your little truth. Gripped in his callused hands, there’s something worth writing around. And that you don’t understand the shape of this truth or how to hold something so small is the reason you should try. That you are terrified of getting it wrong and embarrassing yourself and betraying that drywaller is why you should write it.

I’m going to risk a foolishly big truth here: Write the stories you’re scared to write. Skip those ones that feel big enough to be literature. Don’t worry about whether your story has enough in it to turn into a novel and sell a million copies and live forever. Don’t write the stories packed full of relatability for the workshop. If you write your small stories that make your teeth grind and bladder hurt and spine sweat because you’re so scared you’ll get them wrong, I promise there will be pages for you and readers for those pages. And then when you become good at finding more small stories, only write the ones that make you anxious, that you doubt you’re good enough to write.

Under the neon flicker of the short story form, those small stories have a home. Stay anxious as you imagine every reader. Only when you’re worried and doubting will you care enough to find the small truth that fits into the palm of the short story.

Sincerely,

A Not-so-old Writer with More Embarrassment Ahead

Charlotte Holmes on the Importance of Bridging Even the Smallest of Gaps

In the 59th in a series of posts on 2016 books entered for The Story Prize, Charlotte Holmes, author of The Grass Labyrinth (BkMkPress), contemplates misses, near misses, and non-misses.

Women’s shoes come in whole and half sizes from five to nine, but manufacturers often leap from nine directly to ten. The “heart size” for most shoe manufacturers—where they do most of their trade—falls between seven and nine, but ten is the afterthought, still a standard size. Nine and a half is not. For someone who wears a 9.5, nine is too short and ten is a boat. The slow pressure that deforms the hallux, the humiliation of losing a shoe while running for the train—size nine and a half women know these punishments because they’re three tenths of a centimeter from normal. Manufacturers must think this a negligible difference.

An editor at a literary magazine in New York, I’ve sent out galleys for the next issue, and now comes the tug-of-war over the copyeditor’s marks. A writer—my former teacher, winner of all the awards, hailed for his unstinting accuracy—telephones to go over his galleys. He’s chatty and comfortable, teasing. He’s asked me to sleep with him several times, and attributes my refusals to prudishness, not to lack of interest. When we get down to the serious business of the galleys, his voice hardens. “In the penultimate line, someone has changed the word to grandmother,” he says. “The cadence, the off-rhyme—grandfather is the word that should be there. Any fool can hear the difference. Grandfather was in the manuscript.” I have the manuscript on my desk. In the penultimate line, typed in the poet’s faded ribbon, grandmother winks back at me.

Over my desk in North Carolina, I tape an index card on which I have copied out a quotation from Caroline Gordon: "Find the exact word, not an approximate one." Caroline is one of my literary heroes. She keeps the magnolias at bay when she writes about the South, and for this, I love her and her books lined up on my shelf. Sometimes my poet husband and I fancy we’re like Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate—married writers under the same roof, toiling in academia. Because these are the early 1980s and no biographies of the two exist, we know few particulars of their lives. When we imagine ourselves like them, we don’t think of their violent quarrels over his infidelities, or their alcoholism, or the way they farmed out their daughter so they could write. We imagine them behind their typewriters all day, sipping a little wine and arguing books in the evening, doting on their only child, teaching classes brilliantly. We tell ourselves that if they did it, we can, too. All we must do is work very, very hard. Who knows how long it will take to make a life like theirs.

Only when I’ve lived in one place a long time do I understand the moon. After years of watching it rise in the same place above my backyard in Pennsylvania, I sense its constancy. The moon rises an hour later every night. When the moon is nearly full, it rises just after nine, and climbs to the tops of the blue spruce trees in the wooded lot behind our house. A little higher, and it silvers my next-door neighbor’s slate roof. This is particularly striking in winter, when the air is hard and still and the black bulk of the evergreens throws shadow onto the snow. The landscape’s rendered not in black and white, but in black and blue as moonlight burnishes the snow. Burnish doesn’t seem like the right word for snow, but this snow is full of light, and light burns. Burnish is the right word after all.

Lunacy: In search of the exact word

I listen to my mother on the phone, her garbled sentences urgent. She’s been dying for a long time, and though her words are unclear, I understand that she’s telling me I need to come to her now, right now. I imagine her bruised hands shaking as she clutches the phone, the oxygen tubes in her nose. My mother and I have always been close. She knows that, of all her children, I’m the one who won’t flake out. Every time she calls and says she needs me, I take a plane, rent a car, spend the time, spend money I don’t have to be with her. But a month ago, she accused me of unbelievable things, a conspiracy of almost comic proportions. If I hadn’t been so angry, so shocked, I might have laughed, might have figured out that her oxygen-starved mind was on the wane. I tell her that maybe someday she’ll realize I had no hand in her troubles. She answers, fluent in the language of aphasia. I tell her I love her and hang up, having a point to make. Three days after the last time we talk, she dies. Early the next morning—four o’clock—I sit in the dark in my freezing front room watching the Hunger Moon fall behind my neighbor’s house across the street. Snow covers the ground on my first day in the world without my mother in it.

I have one child, now the age my mother was when she bore me, the Jesus age, thirty-three. My son is an artist with an MFA, trying to make a living in America’s most expensive city. My mother, who never finished high school, was a housewife with three kids, trying to make ends meet on a red dirt road in Georgia. I’m their point of intersection. When she wounded him with a thoughtless remark, my mother tried to make amends by promising him my father’s things. When he was five, she let him touch the heavy ceremonial sword engraved with my father’s name. When he was ten, she allowed him to hold it. The last time they saw one another, she told him he could take the sword home. Twenty, already an art student, he seemed embarrassed that he’d ever longed for a military sword. For my mother, at least in this case, time didn’t calibrate desire.

Centimeters divide the right from the almost to the never-possible. I want to be able to rely on precision, on accuracy, to incise life into words that find its patterns. If I’m lucky, a story travels the distance, whether step by step or by leaping.