When you tell someone that you write books, they tend to assume that you’re a novelist, but there are also writers who focus on nonfiction, on scripts for television or movies or plays, on comic books—and on short stories.
In fact, many of your favorite writers probably favored the short story—a form that I am also particularly partial to. Of the eight or so books that I have published so far, four are short story collections, the most recent being How to See Ghosts & Other Figments from Word Horde, and I am the author of more than 100 published short stories, several of which have been reprinted in various volumes of The Best Horror of the Year.
So, what should you do, if you set out with the intention of writing a short story collection? Well, for starters, we’ll need to define a few terms …
What Is a Short Story?
Within the writing and publishing industries, the length of a story is measured in words, rather than in pages, because differences in layout and formatting can have a huge impact on how many words fit on a page. For most readers, there are two main forms of prose fiction: the short story and the novel. However, writers know that stories are split up into far more divisions than this, based on their word count.
A novel is usually considered any piece of prose fiction that is more than 40,000 words. Most modern novels are much more than 40,000 words. To give you an example, The Great Gatsby is a relatively short novel, clocking in at around 47,000 words in length. The last Harry Potter book, by contrast, is more than 190,000 words.
Then there are novellas. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association defines a novella as a work of fiction between 17,500 and 40,000 words in length. Some markets and certain literary awards also recognize a further subdivision, the novelette, which ranges between roughly 7,000 and 20,000 words, depending on who you ask.
Next are short stories and even flash fiction (a class of short story that is less than 1,000 words—often capable of fitting on a single page).
Many short story collections will also include novelettes, novellas, or pieces of flash fiction, and some writers put out collections that are made up entirely of one particular form or another—all flash pieces, all novellas, etc. Which type of short story collection you decide to write is up to you and your publisher.
What is the Difference Between a Collection and an Anthology?
Often, the words “short story collection” and “anthology” are used interchangeably but, within the industry, they are not the same. An anthology is a book of short stories written by different writers. Anthologies often share a common theme and usually have one or more editors who choose the stories that go into them. One popular kind of anthology is a “best of the year” anthology, which collects some of the best short stories published elsewhere that year.
A short story collection, on the other hand, is made up of stories written by a single author. Usually, the stories that are gathered together in a short story collection are mostly ones that have previously been published elsewhere, often in anthologies or periodicals, where the author shared space on the table of contents with other writers.
Most short story collections by living authors also include at least one or two pieces that are original to the collection. This helps to add value for readers who dutifully follow the author’s work, as they will be able to read new stories they haven’t had a chance to encounter anywhere else.
The advantages and drawbacks of each type of book are relatively obvious. An anthology allows the reader to sample texts from a wide variety of writers, which can help make them more likely to find work that they will enjoy. Once they’ve found an author they like, however, a short story collection is the place to go to find a bunch of that author’s stories gathered together in one spot.
So, How Do I Write a Short Story Collection?
The first step is to write a lot of short stories.
Some writers see short stories as merely stepping stones on the way to novels. George R.R. Martin has advised that “any aspiring writer begin with short stories” as “short stories help you learn your craft.” For a few of us, however, short stories are not a means to an end, but an end unto themselves: compact, concise, and powerful.
One of the primary differences between writing a short story and writing something longer like a novel relates to how the end product will be read. Most people do not read a novel in a single sitting, but rather break it up over days or even weeks. Short stories, on the other hand, are usually read in one sitting, which allows a short story to sustain atmosphere and tension in ways that would be impossible—and inadvisable—in a novel.
As Edgar Allan Poe put it, “A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.” Eudora Welty had a similar maxim, “A short story is confined to one mood, to which everything in the story pertains.”
How Many Stories Should Be in a Short Story Collection?
The number of stories you need for your short story collection will depend on how long the individual stories are. If your short stories average around 5,000 words in length, for example, you’ll need at least ten or so to make a good-sized book.
Choosing the stories that go into a collection is not usually just about putting everything that you have written up to that point into a book willy-nilly. It’s about finding stories that fit together and enhance one another, while remembering that short story collections may not be read cover-to-cover the way that a novel would.
When you’re assembling a short story collection, you’ll want to place the stories in the book in an order that plays to their strengths. Think of it similarly to the arrangement of a musical album. You don’t necessarily want to transition directly from an upbeat party song to a mournful ballad without something in-between.
At the same time, however, try not to get too hung up on reading order. After all, you can’t control how the reader actually approaches your book, and some aren’t ever going to read the stories in the order that you include them. They’ll pick it up and sample stories out of it at random, as the mood strikes them.
If you’ve done your job well, your collection will still be good when read this way, too.
