Got Stories? Consider Creating a Collection

Whether you write fact-based stories or whole-cloth fiction, crafting a collection gives you freedom to combine elements of your favorite writing forms to transport you and your readers to places both familiar and faraway.

What’s your favorite writing form — memoir, poetry, short stories, experimental? Maybe you like mysteries or family sagas. Or maybe for you, it’s less about genre or form and more about the individual story. If any of these is true, then compiling a collection might be just the ticket.

One great way to determine whether you have the makings for a compilation is to inventory your work. If you tend toward writing fiction, you may have a file of short stories that, with a bit of weaving, could work as a collection. Or maybe you started what you thought was a novel but now feels more like a series of different but interconnected stories than a continuous saga.

Taking inventory works for nonfiction, too. Start by perusing blog posts and postcards, journal entries, letters, a book you may have started writing —any written communication — for a common thread. Maybe you’ve traveled to distant lands, raised exotic pets, perfected a particular hobby or started a memoir about a turning point in your life. Any of these topics can serve as a framework for a montage of pieces with a larger point, such as people you discovered in your travels or lessons you learned along the way.

So how do you develop a story collection?

Think of it as creating a scrapbook, album or webpage. You can start by selecting pieces on similar or compatible subjects or themes. After that, you can arrange them in a particular order, for example, by most recent or farthest back, or by ascending or descending degree of importance. You might even try a patchwork approach, where the pieces are less about order and more about proximity: which pieces work best next to each other.

While these are good ways to begin a collection, you’ll need to strengthen the sense of connection among the pieces for them to truly work both as standalones and as integral parts of a whole. For this, two things are required. First, develop each piece to its greatest degree. Second, meld the pieces together for a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Sounds good, right? So how do we create links, and where do the various styles of writing come in?

One way to create links is by repetition, for example, through characters, people, or settings that show up in more than one story. You might even have recurring motifs and interconnecting storylines or plotlines. Once you discover where the connections naturally occur, you can further develop them by using elements of your favorite writing forms. For example, if you’re writing a series of family stories, perhaps based on the holidays, you might include short recollections and images of what people wore, served for meals, or talked about in the kitchen.

Don’t feel compelled to create a clear connection between the events and the images they may evoke. Instead, you might focus on theme, for example, that one particular family member or constant guest who somehow always managed to be the centerpiece of every gathering.

To further connect your stories, consider how stories are told in the oral tradition. Such tales aren’t always told linearly or chronological order. Instead, one memory sparks another and another. Don’t worry if there’s a bit of mystery in how the stories unfold. The understanding of linked stories often comes through sensory details and the emotions they stir up.

To decide which writing form — poetry, flash fiction, new article or other — would best enhance a piece, consider what would best showcase the scenes in the piece without overshadowing them.

Last, most collections usually feature a signature story that acts as a polestar for the compilation and is often the one that sparked the rest. It rarely appears at the beginning of the collection, though it might appear at the end, as a form of tie-in for all that has come before. More often, however, the pivotal piece occurs somewhere in the second third of the compilation, where it functions as the beating heart of the work as a whole.

Whether you enjoy creating fictional pieces or stories based on fact, crafting a story collection offers an opportunity to use your favorite writing styles and experiment with those you’d like to learn better.

Happy writing!

When Absence Makes the Writing Heart Grow Fonder

Let’s face it. We’re busy people, with lives, loves, problems, any or all of which can keep us from writing. So how does one get back into what iconic Southern gothic writer Flannery O’Connor called the habit of writing? And might what we learned in the meantime even inspire us?

Whether you step away from writing for moments or decades, it can be tough to get your head back in the game. And the mind is where the proverbial rubber typically meets the road. In reality, it’s easier to leave off writing than stick with it. People do have lives, after all, families, pets, doctor appointments. We all get hungry, tired, bored, distracted. We have jobs, needs. And sometimes what we need is a break. Even when we don’t need one, we want one.

That said, I don’t necessarily believe in writer’s block, as people usually mean it: “I sat down to write and couldn’t.” If you sit down and grouse about why you can’t write, you’re cured. But you may not be cured of what many really mean by writer’s block: “I can’t write what I want, how I want.”

Another view of writer’s block is the mental jam-up that occurs when your mind churns out reason after reason not to sit down and just do it, or to stop doing it because it’s too hard. You don’t have time. Your writing is bad. You haven’t had an original idea in recent history. Your work will never go anywhere; neither will you as a writer. Even if you do write, by the time you’re good at it, everyone will have beaten you to the publisher, possibly with your very own idea. With internal diatribe like this, who could turn out another word, let alone one anyone would read?

While we agree that the return to writing isn’t easy, it is straightforward: Write anyway. No time? Write anyway, even a few notes to start. Bad writing? Write anyway. The more you write, the better you’ll become. No originality? Write anyway and revise what you write. Tired, no prospects for your work? Write anyway. You’re likely to fall back in love with it and continue. For this, the French have a saying: “Eating builds appetite.” So, too, with writing, and once you finish a piece, you can seek a home for it. From blogs to podcasts, there are more venues now than ever, and they need content, thus writers.

Even as I say this, sometimes I’m still stuck for a way to start writing. At such times, I use two basic techniques. If I’ve already written something, I edit it. If I’m trying to write something new, I write down my ideas and plans. Then I revise what I’ve written until it’s as clear as I can get it at that time. With the first method, the result is a more polished piece. With the second, I have an outline, which I can divide into sections and revise until they sound more and more like the actual piece I want to write.

As an example, I had an idea for a novel that I thought might work as a political thriller. I love this genre in film because it’s engrossing, and I usually learn something. But writing a thriller requires an airtight plot. So I called on a former mentor, a plot guru, who first had me write a three-act story treatment. From that, I wrote a 12,000-word chapter outline. If you’ve heard the adage that even a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, that’s especially true in writing. My thriller plot outline is now becoming a novel. It’s no longer a political thriller—the genre is too tightly circumscribed to work with my original story idea—but had I not gone through the plotting exercises, there’s no way I could have written the current outline, for a work of historical fiction with magical realism elements.

But what about all that time away, did I learn nothing I can use now? Sometimes stepping away from writing can yield a project of its own. If you’ve seen a film, read a book, been to a concert or visited an interesting place, you might write of the experience. You might even find a venue to publish what you’ve written. If your time off from writing didn’t yield an experience you want to share, the break can still be beneficial by sheer dint of having been rest.

If getting back into the grove after all this still seems too much, remember the old Nike slogan: Just do it.