An Index of Guest Posts from Authors of 2014 Short Story Collections

Hit parade: Antonya Nelson (top),
Ben Marcus, and Hilary Mantel

In 2014, we once again 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 125 authors, 71 chose to participate.* Since 2010, the TSP blog has featured 337 guest posts from 328 writers.

According to Blogger's statistics, most 2014 guest posts received 300 or more page views. The most popular post, "Antonya Nelson's Ten Writing Rules," went viral (by our standards, at least) and has so far drawn more than 12,000 page views—by far the most of any TSP blog post and nearly five times as many hits as the next most popular we've ever had. The author posts with the second and third most hits this year were "Hilary Mantel's Ten Observations About Writing" and "Ben Marcus' 'Dear Writer' Letter"—both with more than 2,300 page views.

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, which we change somewhat each year. The 2014 questions were:

• If you weren't a writer, what would you be doing?
• Describe an unusual writing habit of yours.
• Do you ever borrow characters or situations from real life, and has anyone ever confronted you about it, been angry or pleased? 
• What's the worst idea for a story you've every had?
• What's the best story idea you've had that you've never been able to write to your satisfaction?
• What one story that someone else has written do you wish you had written?
• Where do you do most of your work?
• What do you do when you're stuck or have "writer's block"?
• What advice do you have for aspiring writers?
• What else (beyond books and writing) informs or inspires your work?

We also suggest some possible topics:

• A literary touchstone (e.g., a book or books you have reread many times and return to often).
• An aspect of craft you struggled to learn, and how you learned it.
• Your publishing experience.
• A letter to a young writer, a la Rilke.
• A list of ten pieces of writing advice.

The last topic was a popular one this year, with about a dozen authors offering their advice. Contributors also, of course, had the option of coming up with their own ideas.

This index is in alphabetical order by last name, with author names linking to their book on IndieBound (unless a book wasn't available on that site) and the rest of the guest post titles linking to the posts themselves.

A-D

Kim Addonizio "Borrows" from Real Life

Molly Antopol Embraces Solitude
Jacob M. Appel and the Door to Eternal Life
Vanessa Blakeslee Hits a Nerve
Michael Blumenthal's Unusual Habit
Catherine Browder and the Unmet Mentors
Kelly Cherry Makes a List
Judy Chicurel and the Atmospheric Aura

Mark Chiusano on Finding the Right Cover
Diane Cook Writes from a Place of Fear
Tracy Daugherty on Walker Percy's Thought Experiments
Halina Duraj's Ruthless Story-Brain

E-G
Sean Ennis Puts in the Time
Elizabeth Eslami Embraces the Mess
Why Ali Eteraz Stopped Trying to Be an American Writer
Murray Farish's Writing Advice from Other Writers

John Henry Fleming's Writing Tips for the Tip Averse Writer
Amina Gautier Says: "Remember Who You Were"
Joseph Gentile: Eight Things All Writers Should Do at Least Once
David Gordon Talks to Himself
Nicholas Grider's Ten Pieces of Advice
If David Guterson Weren't a Writer...

H-L
Arna Bontemps Hemenway's Walk into the Otherworld
Jennifer Horne Wrestles with Her Conscience
Alden Jones's Writing Advice: "Don't Listen to My Advice"
A.L. Kennedy Gets Out of the Way
Laurence Klavan and the Sense of Unease
Phil Klay's Middle School Stint
Doretta Lau Does the Work
Peter LaSalle Considers John Cheever Across the River
J. Robert Lennon and the Sweet Spot
Deborah Levy and the Essential Obstinacy
Karin Lin-Greenberg: Notes of a Failed Cartoonist
Sara Lippmann Gets Over It
Jack Livings on Dealing with Rejection
Shelly Lowenkopf's Good News and Bad News

M
James Magruder and the Boyhood Tribulations
Hilary Mantel's Ten Observations About Writing
Francesca Marciano's Ten Writing Mantras
Ben Marcus' "Dear Writer" Letter
Elizabeth McCracken's First 21st Century Short Story Collection
Monica McFawn and the Pursuit of Clarity
Kseniya Melnik's Competing Passion
Jen Michalski Starts with a Dream
K.D. Miller Works with What She Has
Kyle Minor's Unwritten Time Travel Story
Dolan Morgan's Treatment for Writer's Block

N-R
Antonya Nelson's Ten Writing Rules
Kent Nelson and the Quest for the Right Cover
James Nolan and the Singular Element
Tom Noyes Keeps the Faith
Kathy Page Encounters Other Places
Vikram Paralkar and the Agent's Letter
David James Poissant's Letter to His 25-Year-Old Self
Nick Ripatrazone's Sacramental Vision
Eliza Robertson Rocks
David Ryan and the Crowded Room

S-W
Diane Schoemperlen Works with Words and Pictures
Aurelie Sheehan Sneaks up on Plot
Susan Sherman on the Significance of Place
Heather A. Slomski Prepares Herself
Justin Taylor and the Unwriteable Idea
Johnny Townsend Wrestles with the Truth
Lee Upton Breaks the Ice
Anne Valente on Fiction and the Language of Film
Marek Waldorf Paints a Picture
John Warner's Unlikely Inspiration

D.W. Wilson's Headspace Thing

Christian Winn and the Search for Meaning
Kathleen Winter and the Scary Fat Boy Story
Jonathan Woods and The Hard-Boiled Tradition

* Whether or not someone contributes a post has nothing to do with the books we choose as finalists or for our long-list. We received 129 books, but some authors published more than one this year. One 2014 contributor to TSP, Jacob M. Appel, published two short story collections in 2014, but we only invite each author to contribute to the blog one time in any year. Appel's other book is Einstein's Beach House (Pressgang).

Ben Marcus' "Dear Writer" Letter

In the 17th in a series of posts on 2014 books entered for The Story Prize, Ben Marcus, author of Leaving the Sea (Alfred A. Knopf), addresses a would-be author.

Dear Writer:

I trust this finds you immersed in your work, suffering alternating spells of doubt and excitement, doing your best not to entertain impossible questions like What is fiction for? and Who will read my work? Good. Those questions can churn in the background, along with other larger unanswerables, but right now you need your best head space for getting something done.

You’ve heard all of the advice already—show don’t tell, write what you know—and after giving it serious due, you’ve laughed in its face. Then you stepped on it. Also good.

Your blinders are on, your Internet is off, and you have somehow carved out a daily schedule into your very hectic life. Fine. You probably also have some goals. At a thousand words a day you’d finish a draft of your novel in two or three months, an absurdly quick pace. But did you do the math that suggested that at two hundred and fifty words a day you’d finish a draft in a year or so, still ridiculously fast, as far as novels go? And if you lowered your word count expectations, wouldn’t it stand to reason that those words would be more sharply gathered, more coherent, more precise? Would they be truer to your vision of your book, and would they more forcefully invite readers into the world you’re creating? Because you could bang out two hundred and fifty words and then revise them about a hundred times each day, maybe perfect them, rather than charging ahead just to get more words. More words are a fallacy. But you know that. It’s about the right words, and, well, if it so happens that you can rightly order a thousand of them or more a day, well then you should. Still, you have a strong suspicion that this obsession with word count is somehow deeply beside the point. And your suspicion is correct.

By your desk I imagine that you have a pile of books. A few shelves maybe, somehow related to your dream of this novel. Mixed in with all of the research texts you’ll only ever skim are perhaps a handful of novels that you mean to learn something from. When you’re not writing you pick up these books and try to observe the techniques. Perspective and tense, the approach to time, character detail, structure. How the exposition is balanced with the narrative, how the feeling somehow leaks up out of nothing. You read from these books relentlessly and you underline the sentences that interest you.
You read them aloud, you write them out by hand. From these books you design little exercises for yourself to practice the techniques you need to master. Good. You cannot do this enough. You read in bed before you go to sleep. In the morning before you get out of bed you pick up a book and read. Even just a few pages. This is the best nourishment for writing. This and no TV, no Internet. Add to this some exercise every day, a walk or a swim just when your work is exhausting you, because the motion of your body can trigger your best problem solving.

And of course if you do not face enormous, seemingly insurmountable problems as you pick your way forward into your novel, then something is wrong. Problems are the best sign that you might be onto something.

All of this is just regimen, and it’s obvious. But the strictness of the regimen will help your book come into being. Strictness, focus, relentless drive. Persistence and no small bit of mania.

When you’re ready for outside readers you know better than to show your novel to good friends, friends who want you to succeed, who also hope to preserve the friendship, which keeps them from being impartial standard-bearers for your work. You also know better than to show your novel, if it’s advice you want, to someone who doesn’t actually read, won’t read another book this year, hasn’t read one in a while. No offense to those people, but, uh, you know. I’m sure they mean well. Let’s also leave off partners and spouses and parents, at least as critical readers. You know this, too, of course. We love our partners, spouses, and parents, if imperfectly, but when we show our books to these people it’s to get validation. Validation is important, go and get some. But once you’ve gotten it, it’s time for criticism. Real criticism is much harder to find, and it’s much more important when it comes to improving your book.

A good outside reader is someone who holds you to a higher standard, someone who wants more from you than you might really be capable of, who sees the book on your terms, but raises the bar for you by showing you what might be possible in your revisions.

When you show your novel to someone like this, you know better than responding defensively to any criticism you hear. You do not get to follow your readers home to explain what you meant. Everything must be on the page. You know that you should listen carefully to your critique, take good notes, ask some polite questions, and then, in gratitude, send them a gift: a bottle, or a case, of something wonderful. A live animal, maybe.

We have not discussed what kind of book you will write, because this is up to you. Please let it be up to you. I beg you. It is your secret and it is almost all that matters. This is your book. The world has enough books that were written according to dreams or ideas other than your own. But it does not yet have your book. Please write only the book you most want to write, the book you wished existed in the world. The book must meet your own deepest desire for what a book can be. But of course you know this already. It’s why you started writing in the first place.

Good luck.

Courage and Prose: A Night with McSweeney’s at the Housing Works Bookstore Café

By Patrick Thomas Henry

Writing prose requires courage, and reading prose equips us with bravery. Three McSweeney’s authors conveyed this at “McSweeney’s Presents: Diane Williams, Ben Marcus, and Deb Olin Unferth,” held at the Housing Works Bookstore Café in New York, on the evening of March 12. The message is appropriate, given Housing Works’s efforts to foster a healing community for those afflicted by the dual scourges of HIV/AIDS and homelessness. Amanda Bullock, the Bookstore Café’s events director, spoke briefly about Housing Works and its mission before introducing each of the evening’s readers; the publishers, Bullock said, had donated the books being sold at the event.

At the podium: Deb Olin Unferth, Ben Marcus, and Diane Williams

Unferth, the first to take to the podium, read from her memoir Revolution (Henry Holt 2011). The bright and candid sound of Unferth’s voice amplified the sarcasm murmuring throughout her prose.  Unferth shared an excerpt from a section entitled “Good Ideas,” which related her flirtation with Christianity—a conversion spurred by her then-boyfriend, George. This riled Unferth’s Jewish family, which retaliated in kind: with devout Judaism. Exasperated at the family’s desperate affair with faith, Unferth’s sister lamented the costs of an imposed religious education: “Three days a week I had to go.  While everyone else was having fun. One day you and your God will pay.” Writing of this kind requires soul and bravery because the material is personal, but this sort of prose needs to be open enough that its inherent irony resonates. The audience’s laughter confirmed the power of Unferth’s understated irony.

Ben Marcus, the evening’s second reader, redirected the evening from soulful nonfiction toward relentless fiction. Marcus read from his novel The Flame Alphabet (Knopf 2012), set in an alternate reality where children’s toxic language literally sickens adults. The novel is a parable for how society collapses when we cannot stomach others’ attitudes, and Marcus couches this dramatic tension in Sam and Claire’s struggles with their daughter Esther. But Marcus is not without sensitivity: Sam and Claire yearn to communicate with Esther, to celebrate her birthday and express their love with such endearments as “Sweetie”—even if Esther retaliates that such an appellation is “a word used for pets” and is like her parents “throwing up on” her. What Marcus generates, here, is the reciprocal danger of language: Words can poison, and a response can further toxify a relationship. But this novel is courageous in its adamant belief that we must try to communicate, to find a cure for sickening rhetoric.

Ironically, only words can grant that solace. Diane Williams, the last of the evening’s three readers, took to the podium and read selections from her new collection of flash fictions, Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty (McSweeney’s 2012). She prefaced her reading by noting that she finds courage in short stories.  Williams demonstrated that short stories do embolden us against the catastrophes of daily life through the pieces “The Emporium,” “On the Job,” “Arm under the Soil,” “Enormously Pleased,” and “Lord of the Face.” “On the Job,” for instance, transforms a man’s decision to buy a belt buckle into an instructive moment through an extended horseracing metaphor. The protagonist resembles “a man whose leader has failed him time after time,” who simply wants to find a way back into the race of life, so he buys a snazzy belt buckle and goes home to his wife. The man needs this woman and her support—he is like “a horse that could not ever get out of its neck-high stall on its own”—and yet he cannot make himself sincere with his wife. The stories in Vicky Swanky revel in this kind of deceptive simplicity: plots that appear linear, brief encounters, chance observations, a looming image or metaphor. Yet, Williams manages to contrive a hinge in each of these stories, images like the belt buckle in “On the Job,” which open the pieces to reveal how Williams’s characters survive in this world.

Prose, no matter how simple or straightforward it seems at first, requires writers with bravery and soul enough to address the ironies of daily life. Because of this, however, writing at its best rewards readers by supplying them with courage, with the knowledge of how to face an increasingly complex world.