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

Susan Perabo Urges Writers to Stop Thinking About Themselves

In the seventh in a series of posts on 2016 books entered for The Story Prize, Susan Perabo, author of Why They Run the Way They Do (Simon & Schuster), offers her best advice.

Look out, not in. If you’re a writer, you’re already prone to looking in. You’ve spent your whole life looking inside yourself. Deeply. Am I right? So stop it. Enough already. Look out.

As a fiction writer, you must constantly exercise your imagination, and you do this by looking out. You must look at the woman next to you at the deli counter, ordering six pounds of potato salad, and ask yourself, “What’s that woman thinking? Where’s she going? Who’s going to eat all that potato salad?” Because that woman is not the same as you. Her six pounds of potato salad is not your six pounds of potato salad. This is crucial: Do not ask yourself, "If I were that woman, why would I be buying six pounds of potato salad?" That is not the right question, because you are not that woman. It is a disservice to humanity to allow your characters to become versions of you. Do not dress yourself up as other people. This is not Halloween; this is fiction.

Potato salad: What's she thinking?

How many times have you asked yourself, looking around these past several months, “My God, what are those people thinking?” Do not allow this to become a rhetorical question. As a writer (not to mention a person), that is precisely the question that must be answered. What are those people thinking? In some cases you will have to work really, really hard to come to even a tiny fragment of an answer, a sliver of understanding. You might have to put aside everything you know to be true, everything you believe in your heart. You have to consider this question – "What are those people thinking? "—with your slate as blank as it can possibly be. And maybe then you will get a glimmer of insight. Maybe then you can look at someone whose history and values and opinions are drastically different from your own, and you can know where their potato salad is going.

And then you go to the page. You set yourself aside. You try to be as invisible as Chekhov. You fail. Again and again, you fail. But over time you find ways to avoid your own traps, to trick yourself into non-existence. If I’m part way through a story and I stop mid-scene and think, “Yes, Susan, but what are you really trying to say with this story?” I close the document immediately and I don’t return to it until I’ve excised that question from my brain. I perform this excision not by thinking about the story as a whole but by thinking only about the characters, by tricking myself (again) into believing those characters are not my own creations, by reminding myself of the Great Lie that I am not constructing their story but simply relaying it. Instead of high-falutin’ questions about my own authorial intent, instead of attempting to decide whether I’m writing this particular tale in a tradition more closely aligned with O’Connor than with Cheever, instead of imagining what a reader might consider the “takeaway” from my story, I ask myself these kinds of questions:

• “So what did she do after she found the note in the medicine chest?”
• “So what did he say after she told him his shoes were out of style?” 
• “So what happened when she remembered that her mother hated potato salad?”

And back to the story—not my story, but their story—I go.