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

Katie Chase's Ten Simple Steps to a Short Story Collection

In the 28th in a series of posts on 2016 books entered for The Story Prize, Katie Chase, author of Man & Wife (A Strange Object), offers guidance on producing a collection of stories.

1. Fall in love with the short story: the earthquake of literature. But more specifically, fall in love with short story collections, the rumbling of one voice along the Richter scale. Extend the metaphor to Moore’s Birds of America, Diaz’s Drown, Munro’s Anything: aftershocks, destruction of your infrastructure.
2. Write a bunch of stories. Then write a bunch more. Write from life, write from imagination, write from prompts and in a spirit of experimentation. Write a suite of flash fiction, attempt a novella, write a bunch in the sweet spot between 10 and 20 pages.
3. Write one—just one, everyone starts with one—that is actually pretty good. This, as you’ve well discovered, cannot be willed. In fact, the process will bear similarities to that of stories that were actually pretty bad. It will happen as though by accident, as though in spite of yourself, maybe when you least expect it, maybe when you need it most.
4. Submit your work, but especially that story, ruthlessly. Start at the top (as you deem it) and pretend to miss the bit about simultaneous submissions. There are so many strong, beautiful, and loving publications these days—just not many that are rich. Good work will find a home, eventually.
5. Repeat previous steps as needed, until you’ve waved down the attention of a person who wields a moderate amount of power in the literary world (an agent, an editor) and convinced them to give you a lift. Luck will play its role alongside that of hard work, so it is best to focus on the latter and ascribe the success of sworn enemies and those picked up by prize anthologies to the former. 
   
6. With this new momentum, shape up a thematically or otherwise linked collection of your stories and shop it around to publishers. Preferably not in the same year that a financial crisis has hit and shaken the economy to its core, and not at the same time that a celebrity is conducting a bidding war for his or her story collection. But when it doesn’t sell, don’t despair.
7. Because of “two-book deals,” start working on a novel. Invest no less than two years in this relationship—you have to give it a fighting chance—but no more than ten. (If you were directed to this and previous steps via the list of Ten Simple Steps to a Novel, congrats; you have a workable draft! If not, proceed to our Step 8.)
8. When your novel seems not to be working, despair. Put it in a drawer and write more stories: better stories. Write the stories that have been simmering, that bubbled up but that you tamped back down. Write all the stories—right now!—that you have been “saving,” because death, I’m sorry to say, is all too real.
9. In a simple yet elegant ceremony, renew your vows to the short story. Under a full moon in a clearing, before a candle at an altar, level with the sunrise across the sea: promise to never stray again. (Of course, Step 11, omitted from this list as per its title, is to revive your flirtation, laced with scorn though it may be, with the novel.)
10. Gather the best of the best of your stories, the ones that stand out on their own and seem to be speaking to one another, even if all you can hear of the conversation is a murmur, and get them, however you may, to a publisher (whether Big Five or small, strong, and beautiful—it’s 2016, after all) who will fall in love and can summon the sound into more of a song. In comparison to the steps that came before—particularly if in Step 9 you became reconciled on the point of money—this last one will be easy. (Easier.)