Why Short Story Writing Can Help With Your Novel
Editor Michael Woodson discusses the creative benefits of shifting to short story writing when you’re in the middle of your novel draft.
My writing group has been meeting regularly for the past six years, and in those years we’ve all had various writing projects we’ve been working on—novels, novellas, short stories, scripts, speeches, articles, and children’s books, to name a few.
My main goal for my writing group is to finish a novel, and I’ve learned a lot about myself in the process of meeting these past years. I’ve learned that I can’t simply rely on pantsing my way toward success, and that my preference for pantsing is mostly coming from a place of wanting to shortcut the writing process. This isn’t true for all pantsers, and isn’t always true for me, but I have to be honest with myself and say that the idea of plotting always felt like an extra step that got in the way of the “fun” part of writing, when in reality so far, pantsing is the thing stopping me from writing. Plotting is the route I must know in order to reach my destination, and then pantsing is the journey I take along the way.
Something else I’ve learned, too, is that pivoting and having multiple irons in the fire helps me maintain my creativity, but those projects can’t need the same things from me. I can’t be working on two novel manuscripts at the same time and pivot between the two; that just feels like two mountains I can’t traverse. But what has helped is pivoting to short story writing when I’m in the messy middle of novel writing.
I love short stories. Short stories have a unique energy, and they get to break so many rules along the way. If I’m working on a draft of a novel, I now almost always have a short story idea waiting in the wings for me to chip away at it. The energy that comes with short stories and the feeling of actually finishing something invigorates me to jump back into the novel. Shifting to short stories in the midst of novel-writing is like being on vacation with people who, no matter how deeply you love them, you just need one afternoon to yourself—and after that lone walk on the beach, that jaunt into town, you’re able to rejoin the festivities renewed and energized.
Short story collections, too, are perfect for the busy life. When you have a full-time job or you’re a caregiver or any number of reasons why life gets in the way of your hobbies, reading and finishing a novel can feel like another thing to add to your to-do list. Meanwhile, a short story collection is just waiting for you to pick it up, and in one sitting you can read an entire story, and your body fills with that satisfying feeling that only comes with absorbing a beginning, middle, and end. And look! You have 11 more at your disposal!
Here are six short story collections to add to your TBR pile, both for the pleasure of reading them and to help inspire your writing.*
*Summaries provided by Bookshop.org.
Florida by Lauren Groff
Lauren Groff brings the reader into a physical world that is at once domestic and wild—a place where the hazards of the natural world lie waiting to pounce, yet the greatest threats and mysteries are still of an emotional, psychological nature. A family retreat can be derailed by a prowling panther, or by a sexual secret. Among those navigating this place are a resourceful pair of abandoned sisters; a lonely boy, grown up; a restless, childless couple, a searching, homeless woman; and an unforgettable, recurring character—a steely and conflicted wife and mother.
The stories in this collection span characters, towns, decades, even centuries, but Florida—its landscape, climate, history, and state of mind—becomes its gravitational center: an energy, a mood, as much as a place of residence.
The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck
In 12 stories set across three centuries, The History of Sound examines the unexpected ways the past returns to us and how love and loss are entwined and transformed over generations. In Ben Shattuck's ingenious collection, each story has a companion story, which contains a revelation about the previous, paired story. Mysteries and murders are revealed, history is refracted, and deep emotional connections are woven through characters and families.
The haunting title story recalls the journey of two men who meet around a piano in a smoky, dim bar, only to spend a summer walking the Maine woods collecting folk songs in the shadow of the First World War, forever marked by the odyssey. Decades later, in another story, a woman discovers the wax cylinders recorded that fateful summer while cleaning out her new house in Maine. Shattuck’s inventive, exquisite stories transport readers from 1700s Nantucket to the contemporary woods of New Hampshire and beyond—into landscapes both enduring and unmistakably modern. Memories, artifacts, paintings, and journals resurface in surprising and poignant ways among evocative beaches, forests, and orchards, revealing the secrets, misunderstandings, and love that linger across centuries.
Bliss Montage by Ling Ma
In Bliss Montage, Ling Ma brings us eight wildly different tales of people making their way through the madness and reality of our collective delusions: love and loneliness, connection and possession, friendship, motherhood, the idea of home. A woman lives in a house with all her ex-boyfriends. A toxic friendship grows up around a drug that makes you invisible. An ancient ritual might heal you of anything—if you bury yourself alive.
Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor
In the series of linked stories at the heart of Filthy Animals, set among young creatives in the American Midwest, a young man treads delicate emotional waters as he navigates a series of sexually fraught encounters with two dancers in an open relationship, forcing him to weigh his vulnerabilities against his loneliness. In other stories, a young woman battles with the cancers draining her body and her family; menacing undercurrents among a group of teenagers explode in violence on a winter night; a little girl tears through a house like a tornado, driving her babysitter to the brink; and couples feel out the jagged edges of connection, comfort, and cruelty.
Grand Union by Zadie Smith
In her first short story collection, Zadie Smith combines her power of observation and her inimitable voice to mine the fraught and complex experience of life in the modern world. Interleaving eleven completely new and unpublished stories with some of her best-loved pieces from The New Yorker and elsewhere, Smith presents a dizzyingly rich and varied collection of fiction. Moving exhilaratingly across genres and perspectives, from the historic to the vividly current to the slyly dystopian, Grand Union is a sharply alert and prescient collection about time and place, identity and rebirth, the persistent legacies that haunt our present selves and the uncanny futures that rush up to meet us.
Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in the American West. Against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado—a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite—these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force.
In “Sugar Babies,” ancestry and heritage are hidden inside the earth but tend to rise during land disputes. “Any Further West” follows a sex worker and her daughter as they leave their ancestral home in southern Colorado only to find a foreign and hostile land in California. In “Tomi,” a woman leaves prison and finds herself in a gentrified city that is a shadow of the one she remembers from her childhood. And in the title story, “Sabrina & Corina,” a Denver family falls into a cycle of violence against women, coming together only through ritual.
Michael Woodson is the content editor at Writer's Digest. Prior to joining the WD team, Michael was the editorial and marketing manager for the independent children's book publisher Blue Manatee Press. He was also the associate editor for Artists Magazine and Drawing magazine, and has written for Soapbox Cincinnati, Watercolor Artist, and VMSD magazine. An avid reader, Michael is particularly interested literary fiction and magical realism, as well as classics from Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway, and E.M. Forster. When he's not reading, he's working on his own stories, going for a run at his favorite park, or cuddling up to watch a movie with his husband Josh and their dog Taran.