Compiling a Short Story Collection

Since my college years my focus has been on writing novels. My first effort was an essay, my second a short story, and thereafter I wrote longer works. Still, between longer projects I write the occasional short story. I discovered the character Anita Ray through a short story, and by now I have about twenty published and unpublished Anita Ray stories. It seems about time to put together a collection of some of these, and that has become my end-of-year project.

Building a collection of short fiction is a separate skill. Work is enhanced or diminished by the order in which it appears, and figuring out that order can be a challenge. During the life of The Larcom Review, I was surprised but pleased that most of the work submitted fell into certain thematic categories without our requesting them. This made it relatively easy to find a sufficient number of works that went well together. The Review published poetry, short fiction (all genres), essays, book reviews, and interviews, along with black-and-white art. Selecting and arranging individual pieces has remained one of the great pleasures of my writing life. The work is both tactile and intellectual, and as I stood over the eight-foot table with stacks of paper at my fingertips I could imagine many different versions of the issue I was working on until my choices narrowed the possibilities, and I was left with the one we published.

The same question of an effective arrangement appeared in the Level Best Books anthologies, which I along with two colleagues, Kate Flora and Skye Alexander, later replaced by Ruth McCarty, published for about seven years. Kate did the honors in those volumes, and I noticed as I read how astutely she had matched one story with another.

Now as I set out to arrange a dozen Anita Ray stories into a collection that won't run beyond seventy thousand words I think about variations in tone and setting, types of crime and recurring characters, foreign and native suspects and victims, and any other qualities that will reduce the level of sameness in stories focused on a main character. I'm looking for an arrangement that will enhance the contrasts.

During a recent discussion in the Short Mystery Fiction Society list, several contributors shared their experiences with publishing collections or compilations, noting that a grouping of stories widely diverse in genre can undermine the book's appeal, and a little over sixty thousand words seems to be the sweet spot for length. I keep these points in mind as I continue to select and arrange.

Another aspect is the cover. I now use my own photographs of India for the reprints of the Anita Ray novels as well as the individual short stories I've posted on Amazon. I intend to do the same with the collection. The photograph must fulfill certain requirements, such as indicating at once the setting readers have come to know through the Anita Ray mystery novels as well as drawing the eye of new readers.

This is my final project for 2015, and it will carry a 2016 pub date.

To read two of the Anita Ray stories to be included, go to the links below.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Secret-Pulluvan-Drum-Mystery-ebook/dp/B00SHWPSPA

http://www.amazon.com/Silver-House-Anita-Mystery-Story-ebook/dp/B0165WGQP4

A Writer's Advice: Write what you . . .

The first advice most writers get is the cliché “Write what you know.” This seems to be safe advice because, after all, if you’re writing about something you know, you are less likely to make a fool of yourself or sound embarrassingly ignorant. But it can also be frustrating to the beginning writer. No one wants to write about a family that seems boring or that is painfully dysfunctional.

A few months ago I had an idea for a story that surprised me. A divorced man finds himself alone in a large house with a life not of his making. His wife has left him the trappings of a life he doesn’t know how to live—she was an avid sailor, for one thing, and he did little more than pick up the sail bags and follow her out to the boat. He took orders when she gave them, and otherwise sat in the cockpit and watched the waves. He had little or no idea what she did to make the boat “go.” Now that he’s alone, he finds himself the owner of a boat, books about boats, and the reputation of being a good crew on a racing boat. He hardly knows who this person is. The story grew from there.

It has been almost over 45 years since I was in a sailboat or raced one. I could barely remember the terms for things, racing rules, and all the rest, but the story appeared, and I started writing. If someone had told me I should write about sailing, I would have dismissed him or her with a laugh and an off-hand comment.

A few years ago I had just returned from India after an absence of many years, and ran into an old family friend. There was something different about her, and I didn’t know what it was until an hour later, after we had parted company. She had walked away to her car, and I kept seeing that image of her walking away. Then I remembered. She’d been born with a bone deformity in the 1940s, and lived with it almost her entire adult life, until she reached her forties, when someone told her the deformity could be “fixed.” I know next to nothing about medicine and not a lot about life in an Indian village (I lived in a city when I was there), but I began to see a young woman in a village in India born with a deformity that a visiting western doctor says he can “fix.”

One day several years ago I ran out of typing paper. This led to a search (before the big box office supply stores) on Saturday morning for paper. That led to an encounter with a paper salesman, which was the genesis for the fourth Mellingham mystery, Friends and Enemies, featuring Chief of Police Joe Silva. The story revolves around the loyalty employees feel for the paper industry, and after I finished researching it for the story, I understood their commitment to their individual companies.

If I only wrote what I knew, these and other stories wouldn’t have been written. If new writers ask (and only if they ask) for advice I tell them, “Write what you love” or “Write what you’re curious about” or “Write what you think you need to learn about life.” But whatever you write about, stretch yourself. Go somewhere new in your imagination.