Cross-posted from Facebook
So one of the most time-consuming tasks on my editorial calender is deciding the story order for collections. I’m hip-deep in one this week, laying out the order for 30+ entries, and while it takes forever, it’s one of the most deeply satisfying things I get to do as an editor.
Short story collections are tricky because, structurally, they aren’t cohesive. You’re curating a bundle of works, rather than a single narrative.
And while there are a series of truisms floating around about the way collection/anthology editors operate — best story goes first, second best in the middle, look for a strong ending — I spend a huge chunk of my time considering other elements.
The first phase is always looking for themes and resonances, considering how each story will play off one another and how its meanings might change when placed in a particular part of the story.
The second phase is looking for clashes: too many stories with the same voice, or recurring motifs and stylistic elements. Every writer has them, and we’re often blind to them until you put a bunch of stories together and hit the same type of ending or opening three times in a row (for me, early exposure to Raymond Carver’s So Much Water So Close To Home means I’m really fond of stopping stories short, and letting reader momentum carry them on to the possible conclusion).
The third phase is looking for “turning pont” stories that can mimic the narrative “gear-change” you’d get 1/4 and 3/4 of the way through a novel. Stories that break a mood, or switch styles/genres in a big way. You may not be telling a cohesive story, but that subtle clunk of things changing gear gives the book a familiar beat, in the same way that a shift in and out of the second act does.
The fourth phase is looking for hand-offs and echoes. Does the ending of one story do something weird to the beginning of the story that follows, or add a little element of connection? Is the mood at the beginning of the collection a mirror of the ending, or a contrast?
(My absolute favourite trick I’ve pulled in a collection was the order of Joanne Anderton‘s Inanimates, where the first story begins with a despairing character on the beach at sunset, while the last story ends with a character waiting for sunset with a renewed determination to fight. It’s such a nice mirror that gives the collection a flow and journey, but not so overt that you’ll notice it without doing a deep read)
This fourth phase takes probably as much time as anything else, and every story gets moved at least once. I thank god for tools like Scrivener and — these days — Vellum, which make it relatively easy to do without endless cut and paste.
Is it worth it? Who knows! The results are largely invisible to readers, because nobody thinks about collection structure in this level of depth. I certainly didn’t until I came across David Jauss’ essay Stacking Stones in the phenomenal essay collection On Writing Fiction, and *he* only seems to have written about it because he judged a major short story award and read hundreds of collections back to back.
But I like to think it’s where Brain Jar Press adds value with collection projects, and that most of the collections go out stronger for the consideration of the book as a whole rather than just treating them like a bundle of disconnected stories.
And it is my favourite part of the gig, despite the time investment.