A good rule of thumb is that you should begin with a strong piece, change pace with the second piece, and make your third story a very strong one. You should also try to end on a strong note. What happens between the third story and the last one, well, that can get tricky. It certainly did for me. I tried to “lighten” the book up a little with stories like “Superstitions of the Indians” and “Lost Boys.” Did that work? I’m still mulling that question over. MM: I’ve heard that short story collections are one of the hardest types of creative writing to get published. How do you determine if your characters and narratives belong in a short story or in a longer form such as a novel? What advice do you have for burgeoning writers of short fiction? What about writers that have a collection of short stories – how can they take the individual works and form them into something more cohesive? AH: Publishers love novels because a novel is easier to package and pitch. It’s usually about one thing. So there’s still a strong sense that if you want to publish with a New York publisher that you need to write a novel. But the skill sets aren’t the same. Some writers are natural novelists. I’m not. I wrote very hard for twelve years before I found an idea that was big enough for me to sustain for 300 pages. I had decided I might never write a novel, that I might never “see” the world in that bigger, panoramic way. And I sort of stopped worrying about it. Then the character who became the narrator ofKeeneland , my first novel, began to talk to me, and she wouldn’t stop, not even after I put her at the center of a short story. So I just plunged intoKeeneland , and I did it without much of an agenda. A novel about the scrappy characters on the backside of a thoroughbred race track didn’t have obvious commercial appeal. I wrote the book because I wanted to write it. That’s the key for me. I stick with stories, or novels, because Ihave to, because they gnaw at me. I don’t think about markets or money or anything much beyond trying to get the characters down as honestly and complexly as I can. The publishing world is changing, and I think the changes are exciting. Smaller presses are publishing story collections in a big way. And there are publishers who wish to publish novellas—a form I also adore. So it’s an exciting time. None of the doors are closed. I think you’d find a mix of opinions among editors about what makes a great story collection. Is diversity of style, mood, content, and setting a plus? Or is it better to steep a reader in a group of stories that have shared characters and settings, that read as if they were written as a group? I’ve assembled both types of books. I can’t say that one is better than the other. Emerging writers, however, are probably wise to begin thinking about a book that showcases their voice. Voice is the thing you can’t fake. It’s the element of your prose that makes you memorable, that insists its way into a reader’s mind. 78 theMeadow
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODQ3NA==