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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 collecti...

It's not surprising that gardening has been compared to writing poetry. Like gardeners, poets mark out an enclosed area within which elements of the natural world are manipulated for aesthetic ends. What's stranger is how close the two disciplines have stayed through history. For the ancient Chinese nature was orderly, peaceful, and helpful to humanity so conflict between nature and artifice was minimal. Gardens were poems where man could come to terms with the universe: scaled models of nature. Arabs had a different attitude. The gardens of the Taj Mahal and the Alhambra emulated the idea of Persian paradise, an escape from the desert heat. Even as late as medieval times, Britain's gardens were much more humble affairs. Most of those that we know of were associated with monasteries. But in Europe during the renaissance when there was a sudden increase in gardening, the balance changed. Over the next century or two, landscape architects rose to fame, organising cheap labour...

Society's definitions Society and Madness As Professor Philip Thomas (Lancaster University) says "There have always been people in societies and cultures who have different experiences of reality compared with the majority, and there's always been an overlap between people who have those gifts, or insights, and people who are identified as suffering from mental illnesses." ... "it's the strangeness of people's experience, and what they try to communicate about it, that's dangerous, threatening, anxiety-provoking to those of us who have conventional rationalities" Society's opinion about madness and how to deal with it varies - isolationism, integration, or normalisation have been tried. Foucault argues that with the gradual disappearance of leprosy, madness came to occupy this excluded position. The ship of fools in the 15th century is a literary version of one such exclusionary practice, the practice of sending mad people away in ships. Soci...

with Elizabeth Baines and Charles Lambert Introduction Writing from a child's point-of-view isn't easy. Done well though, it can be effective and affecting, so it's worth a try. Most stories of this type use a third-person-priviledged point-of-view, though a first-person treatment is possible. Some people (me included) rarely produce child-centred stories, which is odd - after all, we were all children once. Two story collections I've read in the last year or so have a fair proportion of child-centred stories, so I thought I'd bring the authors' views into the discussion. Some writers raid their own pasts "The key, I think is memory: quite simply, remembering, never forgetting what it was like to be a child - ... when I was in my early twenties I made a conscious vow ... never to forget what it was like to be a child ... But I do also happen to have a very good memory: ... 'Leaf Memory' is based on a real-life memory of my own, aged two years and t...

Hoaxes happen often in Poetry and in Art - lost works by masters such as Shakespeare and Vermeer are rediscovered only to be revealed as frauds by stylistic or forensic analysis. For the hoax to work the copied master needs to be unavailable for comment - either by being dead or by never existing. Literary examples of the latter include Ossian (Scotland) Ern Malley (Australia) and more recently Araki Yasusada (Japan) - all created by skillful hoaxers who are frequently surprised that their work is taken seriously. Writers too develop their characters and self-promote. They may invent personae and pastiche works. They may even identify with the persona and take the persona seriously. They flourish in similar environments to those where hoaxes profilerate. They induce criticism because to some their fame or wealth seems undeserved, even fraudulent, distracting attention from the quality of the work itself. Such criticism is enflamed by artistic flamboyance or media hype. The critics and ...

Poets rarely use more notation than prose provides. Hopkins used stress-accents and Dickinson's dashes may have lengths that correspond to the intended length of pauses, but apart from these, line-breaks are the only non-prose way to indicate stress and pauses. More advanced notations exist, used by linguists transcribing soundtracks, and by poetry theorists. Poetry theorists less often work from performance, marking up stress using purely the text, and breaking lines into "feet" - all of which makes their work rather subjective, and easy to manipulate to support their theoretical viewpoint. Of diacritical marks the most commonly used have been the acute accent (´) for primary stress, stress in general, or "ictus" the grave accent for secondary stress the macron (¯) to indicate a "long" syllable the breve (u-shaped marking) for a "short" syllable dots above or after the symbol to indicate duration the caret (^) for pauses or omissions. Rela...

Stories often have a single "privileged" character through which the world is seen. These characters can be rendered in the 1st, 3rd or (usually unsuccessfully, though "Bright Lights, Big City" (Jay McInerny) might be an exception) 2nd person. But there are also "ensemble" pieces with many equally important "glass-heads". When inside a head the other heads are opaque, so we have a chance to see characters from the inside and outside. The technique is fairly common in documentaries (clips of several talking heads involved in the same event are spliced together). It works ok in songs like "Penny Lane", and in some films. In novels the point-of-view can easily be changed at a chapter break, and 2 or 3 clearly distinguished time-lines or story-lines are juggled. Less commonly, short numbered sections (or even paragraphs) are used ("if nobody speaks of remarkable things" by Jon McGregor is a recent mainstream UK example). When the ...