Tips for Assembling a Short Story Collection
Both of the collections I've put together so far have been linked, which made deciding what stories to include a bit easier. In fact, almost all the pieces in Cryptid Bits were written specifically for the chapbook, and the same was true for about half of the stories in Luck and Other Disasters. There was still some curation work that needed to happen—in both cases I wrote some stories that didn't end up in the final version, and it took a bit of fiddling to get the pieces I did include into the right order. But since each of those books occupies a self-contained world, with shared characters and settings, deciding which things fit into each book was pretty straightforward.
That's not the case for every short story collection. I knew that in an abstract, of course, and now I’m getting a first-hand lesson. A few months ago, I realized I have enough speculative short stories to put together a collection—way more than enough, actually, which is mostly a good problem to have. I have options and can mix-and-match things to find the exact right set of stories. But that’s also caused a bit of a delay in getting the manuscript assembled while I figure out how to even choose which ones belong together.
Best work vs. best fit
My initial impulse was to pack the collection with stories I've already gotten published, the ones I think of as my “strongest” stories. The inherent problem here is that “strongest” is one of those squirrely, subjective terms. It's incredibly difficult to make quality assessments about one's own work even when you're comparing like-to-like, and that gets even harder when you're, say, comparing character-driven mundane sci-fi to a humorous flash set on a space station or a folklore-inspired fantasy. ”Strongest” also isn't a permanent trait. If I feel a story has weak spots, that's something I can fix before I finalize the manuscript with some extra editing time and maybe another pass through the workshop group.
Which, ultimately, was what led me away from treating the collection like a greatest hits. Instead, I decided to find clusters of stories in conversation with each other in some way—that are from the same subgenre, use similar themes, or have similar voices and characters. The more I thought about it, the more this felt like the right way to approach it, though it took me a little while to realize why: It focuses the collection around the reader experience. Stories that share core qualities are more likely to appeal to the same kind of reader, which makes it more likely someone who picks the book up is going to like the whole collection.
Of course, making this realization led to another question: What were those key shared traits I wanted to shape the collection around? To decide that, I pulled back from my own work and thought about the story collections I've enjoyed the most as a reader. Which segues nicely into...
Things great short story collections do
1. They have an arc.
This often doesn't mean that the stories are linked or connected in any way. They can take place in completely different universes and still build off of each other. It's more about how the tone and emotional territory of each story align or contradict—and, by extension, how the reader's emotions change from story to story. Jacob M. Appel’s Coulrophobia and Fata Morgana and Sherrie Flick’s Whiskey, etc. are great examples of collections that have this kind of arc.
2. They're intentionally paced.
If every story is the same length and hits the same basic plot beats, that can start to read as monotonous. On the other hand, a slow-burn novella into an action-packed flash can feel like whiplash. Strong collections balance the length and speed of the stories to reinforce the emotional arc, keeping readers wanting to turn the page, just like in a well-paced novel. Jennifer Wortman’s This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love. does this beautifully.
3. The stories resonate with each other.
I've seen this done a few ways. There's the overt strategy of having repeating imagery, shared settings and characters, or a recurring theme that links all the stories (like Anthony Veasna So’s Afterparties). Resonance can also come from the stories being in the same niche or subgenre (all updated fairy tales, all cozy mysteries, etc.—an example of this would be Couri Johnson’s Feraltales) or having a similar mood, atmosphere, or outlook. It really just means that there's something binding the stories together besides just existing in the same book.
4. They're varied without feeling random.
I like collections that feel cohesive, but I've also read some where the stories felt too similar. They were all told in a similar voice and focused on very similar characters, sometimes to the point I found it hard to remember which events happened in which story. The best writers choose and arrange their stories to strike a balance, where there's enough variety that each story feels distinct but they still all feel like they belong in the same book (really enjoyed the way Chris Terry’s How to Carry Bigfoot Home did this).
Curating a strong collection
There are two steps involved in putting together a story collection. Picking the right pieces is the first step, but putting them in the right order can make as much of a difference in giving readers the best possible read. Not every reader is going to read the collection cover to cover, but that's one of those chaos aspects you can't really control. It's still overall best to plan for readers going straight through and build the collection's arc and order with that in mind.
I've been thinking about the way I put things in order for After Happy Hour, too, as I put together this collection. With those issues, I usually start by picking out the piece I want to start with and the one I want to end with. These serve as the anchors of the issue and I fill in the other works between them. I look for similarities or echoes of the same images, themes, or topics and use those to group pieces together. I also think about relative length, separating longer prose pieces with poems or flashes that give the reader a chance to come up for air.
I’m using a similar approach to assemble this latest collection. I also think it's probably natural to have some trial and error during this process—or maybe that's just a part of my process, but it was definitely the case with my first two collections. Out of the 9 stories in the first version of Luck and Other Disasters (which I was at the time calling The Bad Karma Club) only 6 are still in the current collection, and I've added 5 new ones to get it to its current story count. With Cryptid Bits, I started with a core of about half the stories then looked for what else was missing and wrote pieces to fill in those gaps, and there was a good bit of fiddling and rearranging after that. I imagine I'll end up going through a similarly messy process with this new collection as I pull it together.
But the first step is getting the manuscript into some kind of form. It's easy to fall into planning paralysis with a project like a short story collection. Sometimes, you just need to start putting things together, remembering that you can always move the pieces around down the line.
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