5 Tips for Crafting Your Short Story Collection’s Arc
So, your stash of completed stories adds up to enough pages to fill a book. Congratulations! That’s a lot of hard work there in your hands. Your next batch of hard work is discerning what connects your stories, apart from having the same writer, then using that information to put your collection in its best order.
(5 Tips for Creating Trouble in a Short Story.)
In the roster of activities writers find themselves ill-equipped to do, determining an order for a collection falls next to dreaded responsibilities like writing synopses and cover letters. Tasks that require us to examine our imagined worlds from the outside and reduce them to categories, themes, and punchy one-liners invert the creative process and often feel quite daunting.
The first thing to know about crafting an arc for your stories is that one style does not fit all. Collections vary as widely as the stories we write. Some cobble together to tell a larger story. Others are thematically or regionally related. Others revolve around a significant incident or object or character. These five tips for crafting your story collection’s arc should help you identify what kind of collection you’ve written, then find the best shape to suit it.
1. Determine what kind of story collection you have.
What unites the stories? Theme, region, repeating characters? Or is there a recurring MacGuffin, as with Louise Marburg’s collection No Diving Allowed, where each story features a swimming pool? Or is it a linked collection that builds toward a larger plot, like Celeste Mohammed’s Pleasantview, where different characters from the invented Trinidadian community of Pleasantview intersect across stories with the powerful Mr. H? Or is it a linked collection like Haruki Murakami’s After the Quake, which involves a more simultaneous connection around the aftermath of an earthquake?
2. Even with linked collections, you have choices.
In Mohammed’s Pleasantview and Carol Roh Spaulding’s Waiting for Mr. Kim, each story is complete in itself while pushing a larger, more epic-scale story forward. In Pleasantview the stories stack like dominoes toward Mr. H’s untimely death and its complicated aftermath, while Waiting for Mr. Kim traces 70 years of a Korean-American family’s experiences after emigrating and settling in California. In both collections, points of view shift, but the ultimate arc flows in chronological order.
Surveys of a writer’s career, like The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield or Raymond Carver: Collected Stories, often follow the order in which the stories were written, though any that remained unpublished in a writer’s lifetime might appear at the end. Arranging your stories in the order they were written or published is a fine strategy for any writer, especially when no other logic seems better suited to the work.
Murakami’s gathering of absurdist tales in After the Quake covers different aftereffects of the same event, nixing chronology as an ordering principle. Instead, Murakami likely applied some of the other strategies described in the following tips to arrange his collection.
3. Think like a playlist.
For my collection, What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better, stories share themes of loss and longing amidst the same regional setting of Central Virginia. Historical era, narrative distance, and intensity of voice vary, and characters differ by gender, age, and socioeconomic status. A simple timeline would offer nothing for these stories.
To choose a proper order, I focused on junction points, where last lines of one story crossed into first lines of the next. To help me visualize the flow, I wrote first and last lines below story titles and cut them into different slips of paper so I could move them around physically on a table. I aimed for a little jolt of dissonance at each connection point to signal the reader that they had crossed into a new story.
Much like with mix tapes of old, I wanted the collection to begin and end memorably, so the final line of the last story echoes the title of the first and strikes the collection’s salient chord. Here, the trajectory better compares to a sine wave, a continual undulation of different kinds of engagement that keep the reader rooted to the work.
Check out Jody Hobbs Hesler’s What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better here:
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4. Weak stories in the middle? No way!
Toss weak stories back into the hopper. Return to them later if they still speak to you and polish them up for the next collection. Not every story needs to land with equivalent force or race with the same velocity to earn their place. Deferring to the sine wave shape, arrange stories so their distinct powers ebb and flow, forever pulling the reader onward.
So, no thanks to weak stories, but, by all means, kick off with one that’s particularly urgent or provocative or already recognizable to the public. For example, if one of your stories won a well-known prize, you can expect readers of that prize’s anthology to flock to your book in search of the one they read. Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s My Monticello opens this way, fronting her powerhouse story “Control Negro,” which Roxane Gay selected for Best American Short Stories 2018.
My Monticello’s following stories continue to interrogate equity issues while varying in form, leading to the eponymous dystopic/apocalyptic novella, which rounds out the book. Ending on a novella, if you have one, is a good strategy. Earlier stories whet the reader’s appetite for your work, and by the time they reach the largest bite of a story, they’re plenty hungry for it.
5. Hire an editor!
If you’ve reached this final tip and the task of organizing your collection still overwhelms you, there is a workaround. Maybe you managed to finalize your collection without any outside help, but many writers hire editors for all manner of finish work, from input on the earliest revisions to sharpening the latest drafts, from zeroing in on your collection’s central vibe to, yes, putting the stories in their best order.
If you don’t have means to hire out, lots of writers trade tasks like this one. Beta read your writer friend’s novel in return for their input on your collection’s defining arc, for example. The more writers you encourage and support along your way, the more people you’ll have to celebrate with when your book comes out.