As of this post I have published 100 short stories spread out over 10 collections. A collection from me will always have 10 stories in it; I think that’s nice and neat. 100 was a big personal milestone, obviously.
Ray Bradbury famously said this:
The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories. If you can write one short story a week— it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that’s just wonderful.
Once I made it to 50 stories, I indeed felt like I had not written 50 bad ones, and now that I have published 100, I feel the same pride but doubled. I have probably written multiple good short stories. I can’t tell you which ones they are, but they exist.
How I write and organize short stories is very simple to the point of possibly being stupid. It goes like this: I write a story, come up with the name of the collection it’s going to be in, publish it, write another one, slot that one in as #2 in the ongoing collection, publish it, repeat until the collection is done, compile and publish the whole collection, then start a new one.
Yup. That’s it. They’re not organized by theme unless I happen to have the same themes on my mind as I write the stories; Serene Grace is the strongest example of this so far because it’s 10 stories all in first person from female protagonists, but that’s only because I stayed in the mood for that for a sustained period. Except for Final First, which I didn’t know was going to exist until its 10 stories were already written, I don’t do any “track sequencing”— if a story in my collection comes sixth or tenth in the list, that’s because it was written sixth or tenth. This is partially because I publish short stories individually as they are finished so it helps to already know what place they have in which collection. I will probably put out “compilations” some day; it’s hard to argue, for example, that once I get to 10 total gladiator stories across all my collections that they shouldn’t also be released as their own book.
Oh yeah, I guess I take for granted that I publish the short stories standalone. Some people might think that’s odd, and that it would be even odder for a reader to actually purchase a standalone short story. Well, it has happened. I do it this way for a few reasons. One is exposure. Another is that selling my stories standalone for $2.99 makes the collection of 10 look like a better deal. Another is that I get more practice with playing around with Canva.
I strongly feel that it would be beneficial for writers who have spent a lot of time feeling stuck about their ability to produce a novel (or multiple beautifully interconnected novels that flatteringly imitate their most admired fantasy authors) to write some short stories.