Curating Your Writing--What Makes a Collection Sing

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Curating Your Writing--What Makes a Collection Sing

What’s new in my writing room: Honored to be included this summer in the wonderful “How We Spend Our Days” series by author Cynthia Newberry Martin who has interviewed so many amazing writers (the likes of and Steve Almond and Dani Shapiro!) about a day in their writing life. It’s an inspiring look into the life of working writers. You can read about my (not-so-typical) writing day here.

Photo by Franco Antonio Giovanella on Unsplash

Short stories, for me, are a welcome break from long-form fiction and nonfiction. Books take so long, and stories are a quicker reward—although not necessarily easier. I’ve worked on my short stories over the past ten years every time I need a pause from the heavier lifting of novels. I’ve published around ten, won some awards, and generally enjoy the whole world of shorter work.

When my last two novels were released, I wanted a longer break so I dug out my short stories and looked them over.

You know that feeling when you revisit a piece of writing you wrote ages ago—and love it? It’s almost as if someone else wrote it. I fell in love with my short stories again last fall, and I decided to try putting together a collection.

I knew nothing about collections. But that didn’t stop me.

Looking for help

Whenever I stumble into a new writing area, a newbie again, I take a class or find a mentor. And I read. A lot. But there aren’t that many guides on curating a collection—or classes, for that matter.

First, I spoke with two writing colleagues who’d won contests with different small presses. Their collections were well published, and they loved the process. Both emphasized how different collections are now. Not a surprise, since publishing is vastly different too. They also said that there existed a lot of room for different approaches as well.

Both suggested I research small presses and what they’ve released in the last five years for short-story collections. Find the collections that fit my style and interest. Read widely, internationally, and begin taking notes on how collections are put together.

I tried. I floundered. I needed more structure. I decided to look for a class.

Finding a class

I’ve already been down the MFA road—I didn’t want another. So I scanned the online catalogues of writing schools I love. Classes on collections are few! Maybe because they are geared more towards writers who have already published individual stories or essays and have experience?

But in December, I learned that Grub Street in Boston was offering an advanced class, application-only, on collections. It was a five-month class, taught by an instructor I knew and liked. I applied, was accepted, and the class began in January.

Classes are a quick way to immerse and learn a lot in a short amount of time. My goal was to answer some basic questions about how to curate a collection. I also wanted to have my collection, in very rough form when I began the class, workshopped. Finally, I wanted to do that broad research and reading of collections from diverse cultures, to get more of a sense of what’s being published now.

There were nine of us, plus the instructor, and we met online each week for three hours. It grew into a strong and supportive cohort.

Questions to ask

When you’re very new to something, it’s almost hard to figure out what questions to ask, right? As we moved through the first weeks, reading a new published collection each week, I began listing the questions I needed to answer before I could curate my own stories.

What does a writer include in a collection—or not—and why? How would I select the right stories?

Did I need any overarching theme or focus of exploration (for instance, are all the stories about loss or grief or relationships or a small town)?

Do I need to link any of the stories (feature the same characters or place) or is it OK if they are completely separate?

What order should I choose to present them?

Do I follow the standard format of strong beginning and ending, and a strong middle that I’ve learned with my W storyboard work (see video here)?

Making a chart

I began creating a chart in Excel that listed the working title, page count, voice (first or second or third person narrator, etc.), tone of the story (light, serious, humorous), topic, and theme or message if I had one in mind.

I added a column for first and last line of each story, just to see how that varied (it did, a lot, but a few stories were boringly the same in how they started which gave me good clues for revision). I also noted if they’d been published, were finished in my mind, or were still in process.

I learned a lot from this exercise! It helped me take the first steps towards answering my curation questions, above.

What to include

I wanted to include my very best stories. I have about 30 in different stages, and as I said above, about 10 have been published or won awards. So those 10 were put aside as strong contenders.

I wanted to have a total of 15-20 stories, about 250 to 300 pages. Collections are usually shorter than novels, but the actual length varies so much! In class we read collections of less than 100 pages and much longer ones.

I guess the choice of stories came down to what they said, to me as the writer. And how they spoke to each other.

I chose 20 to start, then as the class went on and I began to seriously revise the unpublished ones, I narrowed it down to 15 that I really felt were successful.

Theme?

As I read more collections, I saw a real difference between those with an overarching theme or message and those that felt completely random.

Personally, I was drawn to the ones with a theme. It felt as if the author was fascinated with a topic and wanted to pass on certain questions or understandings about it, and I was happy to be part of that exploration. It also meant I was more apt to read the stories in sequence, rather than hopping around.

I decided I would curate my collection in rough form, then see if there was any theme that held the stories together, even loosely.

Linking the stories?

It’s fascinating to see how different authors approached the next task—whether the stories should be linked or not.

If the stories are in any way linked, that linkage can come from place, one or more characters, an event, an object (think The Red Violin), just as some ideas.

Usually, readers have to guess the reasons an author chose their stories for the collection. A lovely exception, one of our assigned books, was Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia Butler. Butler is well-known to many readers for her novels and essays, and for being one of the few female African-American science-fiction writers at the time of publication.

In the new edition of Bloodchild, Butler includes an afterword for each story which explains why and how she put it together. Where the idea came from, in her own life. And what she was trying to achieve by writing the story.

Choosing an order

How you flow your stories is a big question if you intend for the reader to move through them in any sequence (see Theme? above). If you’re creating a very random collection, you still need to grab interest with the first story. So, as I learned in class, the order matters.

I grew up in journalism, using the W structure that many magazines use: a strong opening story, a strong middle-of-the-book story, and a strong ending. I developed this structure even more in my study of novels. The idea worked well, so I wanted to see if collections used it too. Many did. Sometimes, the opening story was the best story in the collection, sometimes the middle story was.

How can you tell? Feedback helped a lot, but it was quite subjective. I looked at my stories for their topic, trying to see if any particular issue or narrator would introduce the collection best. My collection-published colleagues suggested submitting the collection to presses using the absolute best story first. That editors would rearrange the order anyway, and you didn’t have much time to grab interest on submission.

I also looked at that column of first and last lines, thinking I could link them—create a flow that moved the reader naturally from one story to the next.

Finally, I asked if there were groupings within the collection. I have a number of stories about Paris—should these all be together? One beta reader suggested I group by natural element: air, earth, fire, and water. That was a cool idea to try.

All of this is part of the curation process. As I read more story collections by other writers, I get more of a sense of what appeals to me, particularly.

Workshopping

It’s hard to find readers who will take on a complete manuscript, but I’m lucky in my writers groups and others who have exchanged with me over the years. I could definitely get feedback on individual stories, which is always helpful, but I really needed it for the collection as a whole.

I wanted a reader’s take on how I tackled the questions above.

My class was generous—they read the unpublished stories and gave good feedback on them individually. A few of them, and the instructor, also read the whole collection for its order and flow and possible theme. And my beta readers are now diving in, so I hope to get responses from them to work on this fall and winter before I approach my agent with this new work.

In the meantime, I’m sending out the unpublished stories to see if any get accepted for individual publication. Some authors had all the collection stories previously published; some had none. Most had at least half.

And I continue to read to learn. I’m very grateful for this process—and still learning about it!

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

Do you have any stories or essays that become part of an interesting collection? Do you have a longing or an interest to see them published in a group?

Here’s another author’s take on how to curate a collection, Vanessa Onwuemezi from the UK, writing in Writers & Artists.

And another one from Lit Reactor.

What are your biggest questions about curating a collection of essays or stories? What have you learned along the way?

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