Choosing the right story order for your anthology
If you’ve never published a short story collection or anthology, it might seem simple. You already have all the material, so all you need is a title and cover art, right? But wait, you have to think about the order! A well-planned arrangement of stories can keep readers turning the page and improve your chances of a glowing review.
When you organize a short story collection, it’s a bit like putting together a playlist. (Or for you folks over forty, a mixtape.) You don’t go from a romantic ballad to death metal. You want to create a gradual transition in the mood and sound of the music. Fiction anthologies are much the same. Going from horror to romantasy to violent action adventure would be jarring for your readers, and make your collection feel like a disorganized mess.
So, how do you organize a short story collection? The three biggest things to consider are unity, flow, and journey.
Unity – How The Stories Are Connected
Unity is what makes your short stories feel like one cohesive collection. It’s what they have in common, their connection. There are a lot of ways to give a short story collection a unified feel.
Characters
A character who appears in each story is perhaps the strongest way to make a story collection feel unified. Almost any type of character could work. The reoccurring character could be a protagonist, like a hero going on a variety of short adventures. It could be the same villain pursuing different victims. It could even be a mentor character training different heroes to become the city’s next generation of crime fighters.
Setting
A common setting can also help a story collection to feel more focused and cohesive. This can be science fiction stories all set on the same alien planet, fantasy stories that take place in the same kingdom, or even romance stories all set in the same office or apartment building.
If the setting is your unifying factor, it needs to be special, unique, practically a character in itself. Ask yourself what would keep readers returning to this world. A weird and messy magic system? A rainbow of alien species? A mysterious sound in the supply closet that could be a ghost or Becca’s missing pet ferret? If it keeps you coming back to write about it, it will probably keep your readers coming back, too.
Theme
If you keep returning to the same theme and exploring it from different perspectives, the resulting stories will likely feel like one cohesive collection. A unifying theme will make your book feel like it’s actually “about something,” instead of just fourteen random sci-fi stories.
You may find that half of the stories are strongly focused on one theme, such as grief or gender roles or new relationships, but the other half are focused on something else. If so, make sure that your first and last stories are focused on the unifying theme, and then alternate strongly thematic stories with less thematic stories. As long as every story has some connection to the theme, even a weak one, the book will still feel unified and cohesive overall.
A title story is a great way to convey the book’s theme from the very beginning. Pick one of the stories with a strong connection to your chosen theme and an interesting title, and reuse the title as the name of the book. Putting it first underlines its thematic importance and sets the tone for the overall book.
When I was organizing the stories that would appear in The Doom Tapes, I realized they didn’t have a common theme. I used a title story to set the vibe for the book. The story is about a video store and mentions several movies with funny, cheesy-sounding titles. My hope was that making The Doom Tapes the title story would make the rest of the stories feel like those movies – fun, exciting, something you could imagine watching late at night under a blanket in your living room or while cuddling at a drive-in. If your stories don’t have a common theme, maybe setting a vibe will work for your book.
Flow – The Transition Between The Stories
To ensure readers keep turning the page, it’s important that your book has a good flow. When you organize a short story collection, treat your readers like the audience at a rock concert. Kick things off with a strong, exciting story. Make sure the book ends on a high note to send them off in a good mood.
Or you can look at it like a magic show. When I was a magician, I realized something interesting. No matter how much people enjoyed the middle of my act, they mostly remembered the first and last tricks.
I asked other magicians, and most of them had found the same thing. When I took public speaking classes, the teachers said it worked the same way with speeches. That’s why many public speakers will both begin and end with the bullet points of their presentation.
I knew I had to reorganize my act. I rewrote my magic show so that the second best trick was first, and the very best trick was last. Any new material that I was less confident about was sandwiched between two of my older, surefire pieces.
Later on, when I became a writer and was putting together The Doom Tapes, I thought back to my magic act: second best first, very best last. If you have a third best story, put it in the middle. That will encourage readers to keep going through to the end.
Switch It Up
After you strategically position your three or four best stories, you want to place similar stories as far apart as possible. If your collection has a variety of tones, you can alternate between dramatic and humorous, or romantic and scary.Try to avoid putting several stories with downer endings in a row. After an action-packed adventure or a tense thriller, give your readers a breather with something lighter or even silly.
If the stories are of various lengths, alternate longer and shorter stories. Including a shorter story after a longer one gives readers a break and makes the book as a whole feel easier to read.
When I was organizing The Doom Tapes, I wanted to include a novella with the short stories. As it was so much longer than the rest of the stories, I put it at the end to make it feel like a bonus. If your stories are significantly different in length like this, putting the longest at the end might be a good approach for you.
Journey – The Story The Stories Tell
If you plan your short story collection from the beginning, you can create a series of tales that carry your readers on a journey. While they are separate stories that can be read on their own, they can have an overarching narrative with continual growth and development.
Your stories can follow the same character as she grows from a young teen to a mother with teens of her own. You can show the settlement of a new planet over hundreds of years, from the first colony, to terraforming, to the first major civilization. You could show generations of the same family coping with living in a haunted house. The journey could be a physical one, following the adventures of an immigrant family traveling across the world, or an emotional one, taking readers from grief to healing to joy.
Wrapping Up
Carefully organizing a short story collection is like plating food at a restaurant. It’s the difference between just another meal and extraordinary culinary art. With proper planning and preparation, your anthology can be just as powerful and meaningful as any novel. Don’t settle for fast food fiction. Make your stories a literary meal to remember.
