This is an excerpt of a guest lecture I gave at Corinne Manning’s class at Hugo House in January, on the topic of putting together a short story collection from individual stories. I revisited it while cleaning out my old writing folder and figured that someone else might find something interesting here.
etudes and variations
Let’s start with a reductive heuristic: while the short story is one of the most varied and open-ended prose forms, there are essentially only two kinds of short story collections.
The first variant could be called etudes. In music, etudes are practice pieces intended to hone specific aspects of technique; alternatively, concert pieces intended to show off a certain aspect of a musician’s talent; Chopin wrote three sets of these. In a similar way, a lot of writers use the form of the short story collection to show off their flexibility, their mastery over a wide range of plots, settings, characters. Collections of this type provide a panoramic image of a writer’s style and concerns, and if this is done with an eye to conquering the most territory, you can seem like a virtuoso.
A good example of this kind of story collection is Jeffrey Eugenides’s Fresh Complaint, which contains stories written between 1988 and 2017. Eugenides is a writer who tends to make hard left turns between projects — think of the trajectory from The Virgin Suicides to Middlesex to The Marriage Plot — and this collection presents a trajectory of his varied career in miniature. Each of the stories in Fresh Complaint is entirely its own little world, and each one is perfect on its own terms.
The second variant, and the kind of book I want to talk about today, could be called variations, another term I’m borrowing from music. In a set of variations, the composer iterates on an initial theme over and over. A good set of variations gets to the core of what the theme has latent in it. An analogous short story collection is basically a disassembled whole, revealed piecemeal in the individual stories. These collections take the particular affordance of having a lot of small independent things as a starting point for an exploration of a certain larger thing, whether it’s a theme, a place, or a time. The stories in these collections play off each other, each one a way to look at the same problem differently.
A good example of this kind of story collection is Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends, which is a collection of many very short stories — some only a couple pages. They all tend to have young, Black, gay protagonists who live in Northern California, and the narrators tend to share the same unashamed, direct voice and the same playful queer sensibility. Not all the stories are equally strong, but taken together the book is greater than the sum of its parts.
There are a couple things that prejudice a certain writer to produce a certain kind of book. Books of stories that were all published individually and collected later tend to be the former category; books of stories written all at once tend to be in the latter category. In this schema, Girlfriends is the latter category. I wrote and revised all the stories more or less at the same time over two years, and the stories share a lot of thematic material.
collectivity
I’ve noticed that short story collections by minority writers — gays, transes, POC, non-Western writers writing in Western languages — tend to be interpreted as though they are variations, by default. The marketing copy for my book described it as “chronicl[ing] queer life” and “[a]ttending to the intimacy of Gen Z women’s lives.”
And, well, it does! A thought I had repeatedly while writing Girlfriends is, “am I getting this right?” I don’t think I’d be asking myself the same question if I had been working on a novel. The form of the short story collection itself has a reifying force for writers depicting “marked” identities, in that it contains a collectivity and implies its boundaries and norms.
To put it another way: When you write a book with seven stories, each with a trans woman at the center, you have created seven trans women within the frame of the book. The reader will be asking themself — what do they have in common? How are they different? What makes them different from the people around them? You, the author, might be asking yourself some of the same questions. You seem to be drawing a sort of boundary around the “marked” experience that you share with your characters — delineating it, finding boundaries — much more than you would if you write a novel. This is what we’re like, it seems like you’re saying, without really meaning to.
A trans reader might be asking different questions. Do they know each other? Do they go to the same gay bar? Do they follow each other on Twitter?
The trans writer Alice Stoehr, who serializes her short story collections in zines, has come up with an interesting approach to short fiction in response to this problem. Her short, compressed stories are about the day-to-day lives of trans women in an unnamed city. You have the sense that this is not a wealthy metropole but a kind of out-of-the-way place, maybe a college town, a place with few landmarks. Her trans characters are often underemployed or otherwise on the margins of society, sometimes dysfunctionally depressive or embittered by long experiences of precarity and mental illness. Her stories are vignettes about what trans women are, or can be, to each other when all they really have is each other. Her characters expound on pet theories to each other, form alliances (and at one point a cult), hold grudges, hook up with each other, and gossip.
Reading the first few stories, you think what you’re seeing is a collection of individual women with no relation to each other — after you get far enough into her body of work, it becomes clear that the characters are recurring, wandering into and out of each other’s lives. It’s not quite the same thing as what is usually meant by an “interlinked” collection, because the connections are so subtle that they’re easy to miss on the first read-through. A nearly-mute, housing-insecure woman whose life was falling apart in one of the earlier stories reappears much later as a trans girl who works at a tech company and just moved in to a huge apartment; the girlfriend who kicked her out in the earlier story reappears later as a wild-eyed outcast. There’s a hidden network of character arcs underneath the surface of her collection that is easy to miss but is actually essential to the effect of the zines when taken as a whole.
In this way, Stoehr both thematizes the nonlinear, unpredictable nature of individual trans lives (and the drop-in, drop-out texture of queer communities), and also emphasizes that trans lives are lived in groups. The way Stoehr does it, her collection is the progressive exploration of a complete fictional space, where people really live, from multiple points of view and from every possible angle.
In trans story collections that invent whole new social worlds for each story, the uncanny sense that the characters are all versions of each other is heightened. Stoehr gets around this easily by giving each of the characters multiple roles to play. Additionally, her approach it makes it very hard for anyone to say that Stoehr’s work is “about trans women.” Her work is about these trans women, playing up the fact that nothing exists outside of the text.
This is something that I think is worth considering for anyone writing a story collection where they have the privilege of conceptualizing and manipulating the whole text at once, especially if you’re writing about some sort of minority community.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to anecdata to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.