How to Write Short Fiction for Fun & Profit, Circa. 1996?

A 250 Word How-to-Guide-for-Fiction

The best way to make money from publishing a collection of short stories:

Live a long, eventful life. Lots of harrowing experiences, traumatic heartbreak. Wake up at dawn, drive to the beach, watch the sunrise. End of day, find yourself on a mountain-side watching the sun burn down the forest on its descent. Rinse and repeat for forty-nine years.

Around three o’clock, no less than three times a week, take a shower with someone you yearn for so deeply you want to enter their skin and walk around in it so you can understand them entirely and, by extension, they you.

Watch all the great movies.

Find someone with a deep baritone to read the poems other people suffered to write. Sit in a cafe around ten every morning listening to a piece of music that cost someone else their life.

When you reach the age of say sixty-two-and-a-half years, invent a time machine, or find one at the recycling center, by that point they are bound to be so ubiquitous most everyone will have grown bored with the experience because nothing new happens under the sun. Travel back to 1996, join an MFA program, preferably in NYC or Iowa, go to all the parties so that you meet all the young publishers and publisher’s assistants who will go on to be big name editors. Don’t befriend the wrong ones (you will know the difference.) P.R. agents love to blurb them in Poets and Writers Magazine.

Key Take-Away: Secure a big advance. 1996 was a good year for short story advances.