Organising a story collection

Ok, so you've had a few stories published, maybe even won a prize or two.
Perhaps it's time you thought about a publishing a book. Though we're not in
a golden age of story collections, the situation's not quite as bad
as some people claim: Jhumpa Lahiri's debut short story collection, "Interpreter of Maladies", won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and
The Short Review lists
96 short story collections published in February in the UK alone, so there's hope
yet! Moreover,
UK publisher Salt has
started The
Scott Prize (deadline
31st Oct - 45k words, 18 pounds entry fee)
which will lead to publication of up to four more collections. Why not
have a go!

But how should you organise your collection? Should you just chuck
your best stories together? Probably not.
The ordering of the stories needs consideration for a start, but
you might want to (or need to) do more than that.

People mention several reasons for the popularity of linked story
collections.

• Writers like them - some authors want to produce unified harmonious
  work


• Critics like them - Ra Page noted that "when you get a collection or
  - even worse - an anthology - all the [critics are] left with is either the
  anthology's theme, if they're interested, or just to list what's available
  in this collection, and pick out a couple of highlights."


• Readers like
  them - if they're used to anthologies (readers of ghost and Sci-Fi stories in particular are) then they'll be used to the pacing of disconnected stories,
  but for mainstream
  readers used to multi-volume series and doorstep best-sellers, by the time
  they've got to know the characters and location of a story, it's ended, and they have
  to start all
  over again. Or at least, that's what the marketing droids lead us to believe.
  

These pressures can lead
to several reactions -

• A book might be planned from the start as a unified collection - almost an
  episodic novel. "Pavane" by Keith Roberts, "London" by Edward Rutherfurd or
  "Accordion Crimes" by E.Annie Proulx might be viewed that way. David Mitchell's
  interwoven "Ghostwritten" began as 3 separate stories but we worked them into
  a collection.
  
  


• Pieces may
  be adapted to fit together better, or keynote stories written to integrate
  existing pieces. When Hemingway was putting together "In our
  Time", he read Joyce's "Dubliners" and noted how "The Dead" helped integrate
  the other works, so he wrote his story "Big Two-hearted river" to do the same for his
  own collection.


• Better pieces might not be selected in favour of pieces that fit
  the collection better. Additionally, the collection can be given a misleading title, with
  "short stories" not mentioned on the cover.
  

One would expect a bunch of stories written by the same author over a year
or 2 to have things in common. However, if an author doesn't write much the
collection might contain decades of experiences and artistic phases. Venessa
Gebbie (another author published by Salt) wrote her 1st collection's stories
in 3 years - she wrote 200-250 stories in that time though, which may explain
the variety of her book.

I think that were Dubliners written today, it would be sold by a major publisher as a novel - we're more tolerant of baggy novels nowadays.

But maybe this trend towards linked stories is on the wane.

Salt author Tania Hershman knows as much about collections as anyone. Not only does her
book "The White Road and Other Stories" ("... an author dripping with talent, this is as good
as modern reading gets" - New Scientist Christmas Books Special: Best of
2008) bring together a wide range of stories (from 100 words to thousands) but she also
runs The Short Review,
an excellent (maybe unique?) review site for short story books. Here are her views



Did you feel the need to have a theme for your book?


When I was studying for an MA in Creative Writing in the UK in 2003, I was
under great pressure to not write short stories ("they don't sell" blah
blah) and if I was going to insist on a short story collection "at least
they should have a theme"! I had always wanted to do some kind of
science-linked fiction, which isn't science fiction but what I would rather
call "science-inspired fiction", so this is what I did: all the stories I
wrote for my MA final manuscript were inspired by articles from New
Scientist magazine. However, I didn't have quite enough for a book, and I
also wanted to include a number of flash stories, very very short stories I
have been writing a great deal of since the MA. When Salt accepted my
collection, they didn't care at all about a theme or anything, which was
very refreshing. Thank goodness for small presses who just love short
stories!



What affected the choice of pieces and their order?

I decided to alternate between longer stories and flash stories, I thought
it might work like a sort of sorbet, something intense and small, in
between courses. There are mixed opinions about this depending on the reader
and whether they like flash stories or not. The collection contained all but
one of the science-inspired stories I had written, because of space, and
pretty much all the flash stories; I am not a writer who produces vast
quantities, so didn't have any choice but to include almost everything.


When it came to order, I just couldn't do it myself, I could "see" the
stories anymore, couldn't see how a reader might read them all, so I printed
them all out and my partner James laid them on the dining table and shuffled
them around. There are various themes that emerge when you see them all
together, and he ordered them so stories that might be considered similar
weren't next to each other, for variety. I wanted the title story to be the
first story, and the last story was picked because it echoes some of the
themes from the first story, as the ending of a short story should have some
resonances of the beginning, I think.



Did you reject some stories merely because they didn't fit?


Nope!



In the collections you read, do you see a trend towards linked stories?


Nope! I read a short story collection a month, at least, to review in The
Short Review, and I don't believe I have read any linked collections since
we started, a year and a half ago, and it's not that I deliberately avoid
them. There are a few on the site under the category "novel in stories", but
very few. Most short story collection these days are published by the
wonderful small presses, and they don't buy into the myth that if you
pretend a short story collection is a novel, people will buy it. They are
happy to proudly shout about short story collections, thank goodness!


To give you an idea, here are how some of the authors we've interviewed on
The Short Review answered the question "How did you choose which stories to
include and in what order?"

• Warren Adler (New York Echoes) "I tried to put the
  stories in some rhythmic order that was purely subjective, trying to place
  them by judging dark to light, serious to lighter, less irony to heavy
  irony."



• Allison Amend (Things that Pass for Love) "There were some
  practical considerations: start strong and middle strong and end strong.
  Don't put all the really short ones next to each other. Separate the 'golf
  stories.' And then [my editor] Gina organized them to her own particular
  logic. I didn't even ask her for an explanation."



• Elizabeth Baines (Balancing on the Edge of the World) "I think people
  rarely read collections from cover to cover like novels - I don't anyway -
  but I still think order is important: an overall impression is created, and
  the opening and closing stories, which I think people are most likely to
  read first, will be taken as pointers to the whole book. Since irony is on
  the whole my stock-in-trade, I decided to begin with two of the more comic
  stories, while beginning and ending with two stories which best summed up a
  main preoccupation of the collection: that of the unacknowledged or
  surprising viewpoint. It was interesting to see the different ways in which
  my stories 'talked' to each other according to the order in which I placed
  the rest of them - creating different rhythms of mood or style or situation.
  In the end I found a journey through situations and subject matter - stories
  about adults to stories about childhood and back again via stories about
  parenting - which also to some extent followed developments of mood and
  style."


• 
  Richard Bardsley (Body Parts) "The order was
  dictated to a certain degree by the structure of body parts I'd chosen,
  which ran from head to toe, the opposite of the old song, Dem Bones, though
  I obviously didn't include every single minute part of the body. As for
  deciding which stories to include, the collection was written at random
  rather than consecutively, and since I wanted the styles, voices and tone of
  each one to vary, I went back a few times, had a cull and started again from
  scratch if successive stories became too repetitive. It all sounds rather
  calculated but it actually happened quite harmoniously."



• Nona Caspers (Heavier than Air) "The final book order
  came from a brilliant friend of mine, Maria Healey. She's also a writer. I
  didn't know how to order the final stories once the book had been accepted
  for publication, and she read the manuscript and said - here, try this. I
  think order is partly intuitive and partly world building and juxtaposition
  of texture and tone."



• David Gaffney (Aromabingo) "Me and my editor
  Jen of Salt press went through everything I had, and selected from there.
  Jen at Salt is very good at working out the running order - I sometimes
  wonder whether with very short fiction people dip in and out randomly. It is
  possible to organise my short fiction much more - I have several stories set
  in offices, and several in shops, several about relationships, and these
  could have been put together, but ... .I'm not sure this structuring would add
  anything."



• Peter Hobbs (I could Ride All Day in My Cool Blue Train) "Due to the variety
  of styles I'd been writing in, it did look like it would be a problematic
  process. More of a mess than a collection. But there were underlying themes
  that recurred in many of the stories - some of which I was completely
  unaware of as I wrote - and after we (my editor Lee Brackstone and I) looked
  at what I had, it became clear we were pretty much agreed on which pieces
  worked, and the collection itself came together. Once they were collected it
  began to look almost organic, as though they'd always been designed that
  way. Ordering them was entertaining - it's an odd art, and was mostly done
  by instinct."



• Roy Kesey (All Over) "Somewhere along the line - two or three years ago, I
  guess - I realized that I was closing in on having enough material for not
  one collection but two. I went through all of the stories, trying to sort
  out a way to split them up more or less evenly. None of the usual suspects
  (time, place, character, theme) stepped forward, so I went back to the
  matter of form, and ended up splitting the mass down the middle, with the
  more structurally playful work to one side and the less-so to the other
  side. The stories in All Over are all from the more-so half.
  Once that was done, I wanted the book itself to share the same conceit,
  so after discarding a few stories that no longer seemed quite strong enough
  to pull their weight, I did what I could to arrange the rest such that no
  two stories in a row have too much in common in terms of length, form,
  character, or point of view. That turned out to be a not-quite-possible
  puzzle, but it was fun work all the same."



• Paddy O'Reilly (The End of the World) "I decided early to
  put only first person narrative stories into the book, told by wildly
  different narrators in wildly different styles. Not just as an indication of
  my split personality (!) but because one of the joys of writing stories is
  the freedom to be anyone. I hoped readers would feel that freedom too. As
  for order, that was a case of looking carefully at how the stories held each
  other up. Kind of like a string of different objects all tied together and
  trying to float."

Even experts can have second thoughts. When her book "The Beggar Maid" was at first page-proof stage, Alice Munro withdrew the book at her own expense and substantially rewrote it.

See Also

• 
  
  "Oceans of Stories:
  Collections, Sequences and the Short Story" (a conference run in 2008)
  

Discussion points

• Have you ever been impressed by a collection's organisation?


• Have you read a "novel" that was really a collection of short stories?
  Janice D.Soderling replied mentioning "The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan which, though it is
  called a novel, is actually an intricate weave of short stories from the
  perspectives of eight women. Each story can be enjoyed completely separate
  from its mates, but together they give more. Tan even has a kind of index to
  help the reader keep track of who is who - until we learn to know them.".
  She also mentioned Tim
  O'Brien's "The Things They Carried".
  
  


• Do collections require organising? Don't readers just dip in nowadays, making their own play-lists?


• I've not seen an author produce a book of stories
  and poems, though several (Updike, Lasdun, etc) could have. Why is that? And would
  the reasons apply also to mixing Flash Fiction with longer stories?