Related to structure is the window / house analogy, which has often helped me decide what to include in a story, and how to shape it: if a novel is more like a house or apartment building, then a story is a window into one room. Sometimes asking “What window? Into what room?” will keep the focus stronger. Longer stories can allow for more time to look, but ultimately, in my experience, the attention should still mostly remain on what’s happening in that one window.
There are so many decisions to be made when writing short fiction, and many of them revolve around what to include and what to leave out. Much of the power in a short story is in its concision, and choosing a structure that maintains focus on what really matters is, in my experience, one of the keys to successful story writing.
A few thoughts on structuring a whole collection: for each of my three collections, I haven’t known I was writing to a specific theme. Only once I have many stories written do I examine them for similarities and common ground, and choose the ones that seem to fit together best within one book. (I tried to write a couple more stories once I identified the theme of jealousy for my first collection, The Jealousy Bone, and they were a dismal failure. I guess my subconscious prefers to work in the dark.) Once I compile the stories, I try to structure the whole book with variety in mind, alternating points of view, gender of main characters, tense, voice, and length. Much like an individual story, I want to begin with a punch and end on a strong note; even though all stories should be strong within a collection, there are some that usually stand out as being more attention-grabbing. For Meteorites, I chose to begin with a shorter story about a man taking his ghost father on a trip to Hawaii, because I like the sardonic voice of the character and its edgier tone. I ended the collection with the title story; as mentioned before, it’s a long one, and I thought it would be a good thing for readers to have that more immersive, grounded experience at the end of the book.
Julie Paul is the author of three short story collections, The Jealousy Bone (Emdash, 2008), The Pull of the Moon (Touchwood/B&G, 2014), and Meteorites (Touchwood/B&G, 2019), as well as the poetry collection, The Rules of the Kingdom (MQUP, 2017).
The Pull of the Moon won the 2015 Victoria Book Prize and was a Globe and Mail Top 100 book, and The Rules of the Kingdom was shortlisted for both the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. She lives in Victoria, BC.
