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Some thoughts on story collections & shape & order, or I Have All These Pages But How Can I Tell If It's A Book?
At this residency, I've been working on a new story collection. This week I reached the stage where I was ready to assemble all the new & old material, to see if I could carve out a discernable shape.
1. Made a list of all the story titles & basic features (tense, POV, length, setting). 2. refined that list by thinking about more ephemeral qualities like tone & atmosphere (comic, surreal, grimmest fucking thing I have ever written, etc).
3. Played around with order, made some obvious cuts & additions. Worked on this every morning, first thing for a few days, like a little dream-puzzle.
4. Tape the first & last pages of each story to the wall (like so), in what I think is the working order. I reach each first & last page in sequence & then repeat, only this time reading aloud.
5. Make tons of notes. Annotate the heck out of the original list. Reimagine & rework accordingly. Rinse & repeat when you're ready.
Out of everything, looking at the first & last pages on the wall is revelatory—so simple & yet I always discover overlaps & intersections & transitions, all the ways that the stories have been speaking to each other without my knowing.
Everyone works differently (obvs). Some story writers say they don't think about order at all! Sharing in case anyone has a bunch of stories they feel like might belong together, that might be a book, & are struggling to make sense of the muddle.
I'm still in the early stages, so the order I have come to now might well dissolve or otherwise transform, but this kind of work has sharpened & clarified my sense of what the ambitions & parameters of the book are, what lighthouses will guide me.
