Top Tips for Organizing Your Short Stories into a Collection

How many short stories or poems have you started or finished? Exactly how much work is on your hard drive? You probably have quite a few stories, since normally as writers, every time we get a new idea, we tend to use that as a grist for a new story. Chances are you have tons of short stories sitting individually on your hard drive just begging to be collected. It's time to use your creative spartk to get organized, and create a short story collection of what you currently have before moving on to the next project. Whether you are ready to submit your work or not, this will help you catalogue your work in an organized manner and into a lovely collection of stories.

If your ultimate goal is to sell your work, and you are an author of short stories, it's time to pull your work and thoughts together and try to group your work as a collection. First of all go through your work ,and pull out the best ten stories. Look for a common thread or theme throughout the stories your have collected as the best ten. It maybe you may have to edit and re-edit them, possibly even change the titles to make them work together as a collection. Sometimes something as simple as adding a common theme, or having something subtle, but common even in the ending pulls the collection together. Are they all set in the same town? Is there a common character throuhout each story? Is there a moral invovled in all of the stories. If you find that some of the stories are stronger than others, set those stories aside. Go back through your uncollected stories, and see if you have others that fit better than the ones you initially selected. I have found once I went back through my stories, there were others that could be used, though I would have to do some rewriting, the stories fit better than the ones initially selected. It is after all, all about rewrite. Once you start working with your stories, you will find there are changes you want to make, to pull the stories together. This in itself is motivation to arrange a story collection once you get started.