Story Cycles and Essay Collections--How to Think about Order, Flow, and Transitions

Books, being the long and onerous journey that they are, often benefit from the break of shorter writing projects.

I've written about this before here. I'm a writer who benefits from an occasional pause to the slog of a book. Although I used to feel mildly guilty about this sidetrack into short stories or essays, I usually come away refreshed and ready to sink into the long haul again.

Right now, as I've also shared, two of my novels are making the rounds of contests and publishers. There's nothing I can do to accelerate or make the process more successful. So I'm distracting myself with short pieces.

This past year I've had the astonishing (to me) good fortune of six of those short pieces being accepted for publication by literary journals and/or placing in contests and winning awards. Because the news about books can be slow in coming, these small victories help me feel like continuing. I've spoken to other writers who experience this. There's less pain in having a 1500-word story rejected versus an 80,000-word book. And acceptance is also a lighter win, but still something.

I never bought the idea that writing short was easier--it's not. You still have the craft struggles, and readers of short pieces expect even more from a beginning and ending. But writing short teaches the book writer how to trim deadwood, how to focus, how to find a real point. It doesn't allow rambling.

Eventually, you may surprise yourself--as I have these past months--by having enough short pieces honed and happy to consider what they might become as a unit, a book in their own right. A collection. Which is the topic of today's post.

Collections of fiction, often called story cycles, or short memoir pieces, or creative nonfiction essays don't follow the same structural rules as more traditional books--novels, memoirs, etc. This is because they emerge from the writer's mind in distinct units, not necessarily linked. When considering a collection, the writer has to find a pivot. A common theme. The disparate pieces must circle around something--a point, a message, a question, even a rhythm.

This is a consideration of flow that a storyboard can help with, certainly. If you can capture the essence, the main point or question, of each individual pieces, you may be able to line them up in a certain order that would create a journey for the reader.

I have to wander around this task a bit. Sometimes I am too close to the plot of the story to decipher its main question.

One of my stories just got accepted this week, and a friend asked, What's it about? It's about a woman theater director who goes to Paris for a month when her show is produced, and she has a brief involvement with one of the actors, a mime. But that's really not the main point of the story. To me it's about how much we reveal to each other of our true selves. The mime is more comfortable in white face. The woman finds this out too late. It's kind of a tragedy but all too common. If I were describing this story for a compilation flow, I'd need to consider the meaning versus the plot. Each story demands that. It's not easy.

The second task is creating strong transitions from one story to the next. They can be arranged by topic (all the Paris stories together) or season or people who appear and reappear or narrative voice (age/sex of narrator). The writer looks for variation in rhythm as well, perhaps a tense, fast pace alternating with a slower, more contemplative, one. This is also a challenging but satisfying task, that makes me study the stories more deeply.

Once I have grappled with these two tasks as much as I can, I find it helpful to create a new document (usually Word or Scrivener compiled document) with the proposed order. I copy it to my Kindle and read it aloud. Here's when I look for things that aren't as apparent when I am organizing the book:

Are the opening and ending paragraphs of each story different enough to make for interest? Do they link in some way so the movement between the stories is smooth?

Since my stories vary between first and third person narrators, do any stories need to be reworked so they aren't two or three first person stories in a row (with different narrators, this can be confusing to a reader)? I sometimes with rework a first-person story to third, or vice versa, to serve the collection.

Do the length of the pieces vary nicely? Short flash stories against longer stories?

Does the collection feel substantial? I waited until I had about 25 contenders, revised enough for submission, including ones that were already published.

From years writing and editing for magazines, I learned about choosing the three strongest pieces and placing them as the opening, ending, and middle stories.

Last, a title. For titles, I scan the strongest pieces and look for my favorite lines. I might ask writer friends for help with this (often I'm too deep in the weeds to see). One of my stories had the line "I Only Believe in Magic at Night," which became my working title. Then, I need to go back through the stories and see how this title resonates. Does it speak for the collection?

These tasks are fun, they keep me distracted and happy while my books are still making the rounds. I'll keep submitting and publishing the individual stories in the meantime.