An Index of Guest Posts from Authors of 2015 Short Story Collections

Popular posters: McCann (left), Campbell (top right), and Gornick (bottom right)

In 2015, 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 100 authors, 48 chose to participate. Since 2010, the TSP blog has featured 384 guest posts from 372 writers (some have contributed in more than one year).

According to Blogger's statistics, most 2015 guest posts received 300 or more page views. The most popular post, "Colum McCann's Letter to a Young Writer," went viral (by our standards) and has so far drawn nearly 10,000 page views—the second most ever of any TSP blog post, after "Antonya Nelson's Ten Writing Rules,"  which currently has nearly 14,000 views. The author posts with the second and third most hits this year were "Bonnie Jo Campbell's Confessions of a Story Writer" and "Lisa Gornick Asks: Can Writing Make You a Better Person?"—both with more than 600 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, which we change somewhat each year. The 2015 questions were:

• Describe a good writing day.
• What keeps you going?
• What do you think is the source of your impulse to write stories?
• Where does a story begin for you? 
• Describe your revision process. 
• What’s the best phrase, line, or passage you’ve had to cut from a story?
• Name or describe some hidden influences on your work.
• What surprises you most when you re-read your own writing?
• If you teach writing, how has it affected your work?
• Describe your collection in ten words or less.

We also suggest some possible topics:

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

Contributors also 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 books on IndieBound (unless a book wasn't lised on that site) and the rest of the guest post titles linking to the posts themselves.

A-B

Lauren Acampora's Good Writing Day
Jacob M. Appel Conjures the Impossible
Charles Baxter and the Restored Sentence
Karen E. Bender's Ten Ideas For Revision
Megan Mayhew Bergman's Collection in a Nutshell
Z.Z. Boone Advocates Lying
Mark Brazaitis' Orphan Stories
Austin Bunn's "Plans for Work"
Carole Burns' Free-Roaming, Imaginative Phase

C-F
Liam Callanan Sorts It Out
Bonnie Jo Campbell's Confessions of a Story Writer
Literary Stones Joy Castro Keeps Touching
Bryn Chancellor and the Girl on the Wall
Kelly Cherry and the Hard Work of Imagination
Michael Coffey's Writing Advice: Don't (Necessarily) Eschew Adverbs
Why Saadia Faruqi Turned to Fiction
April L. Ford and the Essential Activation
Kelly Fordon Loses Track of Time

G-L
Jerry Gabriel and the Crux of the Impulse
Lisa Gornick Asks: Can Writing Make You a Better Person?
Toni Graham's Writerly Inclinations

Katherine Heiny Offers Her Apologies
Patrick Hicks: 11 True Things About Writing
Tara Ison and the One Good Word
John Keene's Hidden Soundtrack
Michal Lemberger's Letter to a Young Writer Emphasizes Empathy

M
Rebecca Makkai on What Some Readers Are Missing Out on
Where Margaret Malone's Stories Began Then and Begin Now
Colum McCann's Letter to a Young Writer
What Keeps Helen McClory Going
John McManus Rebuilds from the Ground up
Margaret McMullan Learns the Importance of Seeing
Andrew Malan Milward's 25 Entreaties
Emily Mitchell: Anatomy of a Bad Writing Day

Lenore Myka's Insatiable Curiosity

N-R
Ben Nickol's Shrubbery Epiphany
Sameer Pandya on the Intimacy of “I”
Barbara Paul-Emile and the Insuppresible Urge
Leslie Pietrzyk Gets All the Answers
Kirstin Valdez Quade: All Work and No Play...
Sandip Roy's Act of Remembrance
Mary Rickert's Letter to a Young Writer

S-W
Fatima Shaik Travels into the Unknown
Rob McClure Smith and the Big Fish
Adrian Tomine Cuts a Scene
Johnny Townsend Writes for the Record
Siamak Vossoughi Draws Inspiration from an Unlikely Source
Joanna Walsh Writes Against

Past indexes of guest posts:
2014
2013
2012

Lisa Gornick Asks: Can Writing Make You a Better Person?

In the 30th in a series of posts on 2015 books entered for The Story Prize, Lisa Gornick, author of Louisa Meets Bear (Sarah Crichton Books/FSG), looks to take the high road.

Disclaimer: Putting aside extremes—ax murderer, extortionist—anything we do with commitment and self-reflection can make us a better person. But writing is what I do these days, and here’s how it helps me.

(A list because lists go down easy, seven because lore says it’s the sweet memory spot…)

1. To write, I have to observe. I have to push myself to see: sky beyond generic dawn or dusk, drunk beyond scruffy and stumbling. To hear: the breathing of someone so angry he might punch a wall, trees before a hurricane hits. To smell garbage on the eighth day after an apocalypse, feel a sea slick with oil, taste chicken a hallucinating mother browned with shoe polish.
2. To write, I have to tolerate being alone at my desk, without answering the phone or checking email or looking up Black Friday sales. An act of warfare against the multitasking-google-social media-hegemony.
3. To write, I have to be honest with myself. I have to be able to say this is not good or new or worthwhile. I have to be able to accept that this sentence, this paragraph, this chapter is not working and has to be redone or done away with. I have to recognize when I am procrastinating, in a muddle, avoiding how much I don’t know. Or afraid of pursuing a scene because of what others might think or what it might make me think about myself. And sometimes, I have to say, just to myself, this is a leap for me. This is good.
4. To write, I have to push myself to go deeper and into more dangerous territory, and to work harder and longer than I believe I can. I have to find the courage and concentration and persistence, and then do everything in my power to become a mental tri-athlete.
5. To write, I have to be independent: to take my work as far as I can on my own, so it reaches into my unconscious and is work only I could write. No crowdsourcing, no groupthink. I have to trust myself that with patience I can find my way out of confusion and vagueness and cliché to something that is original and true.
6. To write, I have to accept that I have blind spots and can’t always see the big picture or hear my verbal tics or identify the places where burrowing in or paring back will make the work more luminous. I have to find readers who give honest feedback—not those who primarily reassure or those who eviscerate, but a few people who are committed to helping me make my work its own best self. And then I have to listen carefully to what my readers say, never arguing, always responding with gratitude because it is an act of love for another person to put his or her mind to my work. And, if what is said rings true, I have to make the changes, even if it takes two months or two years. And if what is said feels like it takes the work in a direction different from my own vision, I have to simply say thank you.
7. To write, I have to believe that the work and my development as a writer, not the metrics of sales and prizes and likes and shares, is what matters. I have to resist the statistics of the marketplace, beware of how they can damage the literary soul.   

Do I achieve all of these virtues every day? Never. Do I reach any of them in a week? Sometimes. But writing points me toward the high road—and that, I know, is the best direction.