Something New From Something Old – On Creating a Linked Story Collection 

I grew up in a family of dedicated New Yorker readers, and my taste was formed early on by the stories of J.D. Salinger, Ann Beattie, and Raymond Carver. Decades of reading would pass before I started writing myself, but when I did, back in 2009, my hope was to publish a collection. A goal that seemed within reach as, over the next few years, a handful of my first stories were published in Narrative Magazine. 

Those stories, five of which appear in A New Day, were close to the bone, based on my own life or the experiences of people I knew well. Stories I’d been carrying around for so long, they made their way to the page with relative speed and ease. All of them set in 1980s New York, revolving around young women and men in their late twenties trying to establish careers, lasting romantic relationships, and their place in the world.  

“What else have you got?” asked Narrative editor Tom Jenks, and I froze. Beyond those stories, I didn’t know what else I had—or if I had anything at all. So I count myself lucky that, at a juncture of uncertainty about my ability to move forward as a writer, I could afford the luxury of putting my focus on craft and pursue a low-residency MFA at Warren Wilson. A program where I unexpectedly—and almost unwillingly—began writing a novel based on a character from one of those early stories, only years later, at age 57, after the death of his wife.

Eventually—and with great persistence—the novel went on to win an award that included publication with Madville Publishing, an independent press. But in the many months I was querying agents and submitting it to contests, I found myself at that same difficult juncture. Only this time I was the one asking, “What else have you got?” 

After being immersed in the now long-familiar characters of the novel, I found it hard to imagine starting wholly from scratch on something new. (For “hard” read “terrifying.”) So I took the same approach I’d succeeded with before: I looked back at those early stories with an eye to where the primary characters might’ve landed later in life. Essentially taking my own challenge and handing it over to them. I’d also just read Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel—where she moves so freely through time and different points of view—and was prompted to consider the secondary characters, too, and how their lives might again intersect.

I had a couple of other stories from grad school I’d been revising and sending around that overlapped in their inclusion of what were essentially the same main characters under different names. But once I envisioned these stand-alone stories as part of a larger whole, it was easy enough to sort them in relation to the women at the center of what became three distinct sections, and then to write into the gaps and take up the lives of some of the minor characters. This was also when I noticed that even the earliest stories had common threads of trying to start anew or recapture the past, which gave me the title, further inspiration, and a direction in creating additional material. 

Once all the stories were finished and assigned to their respective sections, I arranged each section chronologically. A few things needed to be tweaked for temporal logic and continuity, but because the stories also reflected the real passage of time in my personal and writing life, those changes didn’t end up being very complicated. I did originally have the sections in a different order, but taking the wise advice of author and freelance editor Will Allison, I moved the middle section to the end, which gave the book a much more coherent and satisfying feeling overall. (It was also his great suggestion to date the stories by year to help orient the reader.)

I wouldn’t recommend the circuitous decade and a half it took me to finish and now publish the collection. But mining your previous work and the characters that have preoccupied you—or merely flickered by—in the past, is a useful way to develop new material and potentially create something of larger scope.

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SUE MELL’s story collection, A New Day, was a finalist for the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award, and is forthcoming from She Writes Press September 3rd. Her debut novel, Provenance, won the Madville Publishing Blue Moon Novel Award, and was selected as a Great Group Read by the Women’s National Book Association and as an Indie Fiction Pick by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses. Her collection of micro essays, Giving Care, won the Chestnut Review Prose Chapbook Prize. She earned her MFA from Warren Wilson, was a BookEnds fellow at SUNY Stony Brook, and lives in Queens, NY. Learn more at www.suemell.com

A NEW DAY: STORIES

For fans of Lily King’s Five Tuesdays in Winter, a contemporary short story collection that explores the depths of everyday humanity and the universal yearning for new beginnings.

Linked by their personal and professional relationships, the characters in these thirteen stories—all set between 1982 and 2012—struggle to achieve happiness and success. A coke-fueled night with a photographer costs a young woman her job in the display department of Bloomingdale’s, but holds a hidden promise. A sculptor tries to resurrect his relationship with an old flame on the same day her best friend is undergoing a bone marrow transplant. An aspiring actress drifts from house-sit to house-sit until an armed robbery at the restaurant where she works makes her question a lifelong pattern of impermanence.

Moody, elegiac, and full of longing, with ricocheting themes of desire and loss, A New Day’s stories are steeped in the highs and lows inherent in the pursuit of love and creative expression.

BUY HERE

 

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