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

Saturday, January 16, 2016

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