FEATURE
Balancing act: The art of arranging short stories Ahead of the publication of her first short story collection, Dreams They Forgot, local author Emma Ashmere navigates the advice – and counter-advice – surrounding putting together such a volume.
Much has been said about short stories – as a form. They’re the literary equivalent of practising your scales, limbering up for the novel symphony. Publishers avoid them. Yet continue to publish them. Nobody reads them. Except they do. They’re back in fashion. They never went away. As Jane Rawson puts it, ‘The short story is both on hiatus and in the prime of its life.’
fewer gear-changes, an almost-novel.
There’s also plenty of ‘how to write’ advice, but less about crafting a compelling whole from various scraps. Maybe because it’s as simple as plonking them into one long document.
Ellen Van Neerven’s Heat and Light is hived into four parts, a hybrid, blurring multiple realities.
Not quite.
Reading like a reader Herding all my stories into one file was revelatory. I tried to sit on the other side of the desk and read them as a reader – rather than the author. One thing leapt out: repetition of ideas, issues, images – even phrases. Nobody noticed these little obsessions when I’d farmed them out individually to different places over years. I cut several stories. But how to tend to the keepers?
Mixtapes, zoos, share houses Nathan Scott McNamara compares organising a collection to ‘sequencing an album’ or mixed cassette tape, striking ‘a balance between familiarity and change’ and ‘fulfilling the reader’s desires, while also challenging them.’ Randall Jarrell thinks it’s like ‘starting a zoo in your closet.’ The giraffe takes up all the space. Or perhaps it’s more of a share house, peopled by a mix of timid, loud, pedantic, erratic, long-termers and fly-by-nighters.
To theme or not Some writers bind their collections to a theme. Continuity of characters/time/events may promise 10 | AUTUMN 2020 northerly
Set in a seaside village, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Sea Road is bound by place and divided by intergenerational feuds. Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, also in a seaside town, showcases an ensemble of protagonists. But Olive is the star, so too in the sequel Olive, Again.
Toni Jordan’s Nine Days interlocks one-day-in-a-life through time.
Order in the house of short fiction For more eclectic collections, the question becomes which stories where? Surely put the published or prizewinners first. But the frame and context have changed. There are many voices, differently-decorated rooms, porous walls. McNamara says the first story must do two things: ‘establish the writer’s authority’ and ‘prepare the reader’ for what’s to follow. In Paddy O’Reilly’s ‘Speak to Me’ a quasi-alien whooshes into a fantasy writer’s backyard. The reader is warned. Uncertainty abounds. Amanda O’Callaghan’s ‘The Widow’s Snow’ invites us into a middle-aged woman’s thoughts during a protracted date. Ambiguity, trust, and death course through the book. Flannery O’Connor’s ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ sets up the skittles with the first sentence: ‘The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida.’ She does. And motors towards a murderer. However, Daniyal Mueenuddin believes the ‘brightest’ story will entice. Others plump for those with the ‘widest’ appeal.
