A Novelist Considers what to do about Short Stories (Cecilia Peartree)

 Short stories seem to multiply on my computers as well as in notebooks, though I often forget having written them. I embarked on an effort to tidy them up and do something useful with them some time ago, but the only visible result of these efforts was that I succeeded in unpublishing two very short collections of stories entitled Five Short Stories and Five More Short Stories. With hindsight, I think I could have made more effort with the titles!

I realised only the other week, during another phase of our horrendous decluttering project, that in addition to the ones I vaguely remembered, I had a whole notebook full of hand-written short stories I had completely forgotten about. I have a feeling that forgetting them was probably the best option, and I’ve been putting off looking at them in case of embarrassment. Oddly the declutterers responsible for unearthing it, although they kept trying to talk me into getting rid of some things I definitely didn’t even want to consider getting rid of, such as my collection of elephant ornaments, a folding bed for possible visitors, and my father’s treasured paintings and sketches, were very respectful of my writing and refused point-blank to dispose of some of the notebook or of my early typescripts and notebooks, most of which I never wanted to see again. Perhaps they imagine I might want to assemble an archive for the National Library of Scotland at some point!

Anyway, getting back to the topic I thought I was writing about, I do have an outlet for some of my short stories, which is a Facebook group called UK Crime Book Club. As well as being extremely supportive of crime and mystery writers in other ways, they also run regular short story events over the year, to which I’ve often contributed. It’s always good to have a deadline for something, I find, and at the moment, as well as working on my current novel, I am writing one page every morning of a short story for the next event, determined to have it ready by the prescribed date in July.

I’ve considered various options for future short story collections, and I’m gradually coming round to the idea of cramming as many as I can into one book, but arranging them thematically. So for instance, I have some that are connected to my novels, including a story called Recycled, which is coincidentally the first thing I ever self-published. Occasionally I’ve written a short story and then realised I could probably turn it into a novel, or at least write a longer piece in the same world. Sometimes it has worked the other way round and I’ve had an idea for a new book in the series but it doesn’t seem big enough for a novel. Themes about which I’ve written quite frequently include Christmas, summer and other seasons, and vaguely supernatural scenarios. I don’t generally read in this last genre at all, and I doubt if I could ever write a whole novel in it, but some of my stories do have supernatural elements, though they tend not to be scary enough for people who do read the genre.

I also have some random short stories in my personal slush pile that seem to me impossible to categorise. There’s the one where I am the protagonist and interact with some of my series characters, another one that follows an anonymous writer who is definitely not me as she tries to write something without multiple fatalities in it, and another in which I rewrite the ending of Romeo and Juliet. I think the best thing to do might be to draw a veil over those.

In the meantime, I am about to put a hapless declutterer in danger… though only on paper, for now.