Realizing you have enough stories to publish a book of them is the easiest part of the process. They have a way of accumulating if you keep writing and submitting over a number of years.
The more difficult task is figuring out how to form them into a collection—one that has a nice variety of stories yet is cohesive enough to feel like a collection and is ample enough in its word count to justify being in book form without also feeling overstuffed.
Which stories make the collection? Which should be left out? Which stories need a minor or major revisions to be included? And where are the gaps that require new stories to be written?
The Darkest Abyss: Strange Mormon Stories, which is , features 18 stories. Of those, nine are unique to the collection, although portions of “The First Six Dreams” appeared in a work of speculative literary criticism that was published on .
Of the nine that were previously published, four were finalists that had been hampered by the contest’s word count limit and so were expanded and revised—“There Wrestled A Man in Parowan,” “Last Tuesday,” “The Joys of Onsite Apartment Management,” and “After the Fast.”
Of the nine stories that are being published for the first time, most have a word count of more than 3,000 words with “A Ring Set Not With Garnet But Sardius” coming in as the longest in the entire collection at just under SFWA’s definition of novelette length (7,500 words).
All this means that you’re getting more new words than previously published words in The Darkest Abyss even though that wasn’t originally the intention.
SEQUENCING & FINDING THE EMPTY SLOTS
So what was the original intention?
I began the project in March 2019 with 13 stories most of which had been previously published. I finalized the table of contents in November 2021 once I had of a first draft of the final story that made it into the collection. Based on my notes, there were at least 11 different iterations along the way.
One of the things that immedietely became apparent to me is that I needed more original stories to round out the collection. Even though I loved the idea of the number 13 for a strange Mormon stories collection, with just that set of stories it felt a bit slight.
It also needed more literary and experimental works so “Certain Places” wouldn’t stick out quite so much.
And the more I tinkered with the sequence of the stories, the more the gaps appeared.
With my first collection the sequencing was easy: I put everything in chronological order from the early 1980s through the late 21st century.
The Darkest Abyss was more troublesome. I knew that I wanted more literary and experimental stories towards the end. But I also knew I needed to make sure readers didn’t feel like the first half of the collection set expectations that would be completely turned on their head in the second half. And there needed to be a flow to it in terms of tone and story length.
So I tinkered with the story order a lot. There were a few fixed positions: “Proof Sister Greeley is a Witch” and “The Darkest Abyss in America” were always going to start things off and “Certain Places” and “A Mormon Writer Visits Spirit Prison” would be at the end.
But everything in the middle shifted around quite a bit. And even when I got the story order close to where it ended up, the collection still felt unbalanced.
Enter “Emma Travels West.”
EMMA TRAVELS WEST
Here’s what I realized late in the game (but, thankfully, not too late): I needed an another alternate history story in the front half of the collection. And I needed there to be something about it that was experimental but not quite as difficult as the stories that end the collection.
I rarely work this way. I don’t start with a genre. It’s alway a line, a title, an image, a character, a setting, a vibe. And yet I knew that’s what the collection needed so I went through my list of story ideas and kicked around a few. None felt right.
But perhaps I should start with a genre intention more often because my brain started working away in the background, and in September 2021 these lines popped into my head: “Emma Goes West. Not to reconcile but to see. To witness.”
I jotted them down, put the idea on hold to complete some other projects, returned to it, sketched out some rough ideas for it on Nov. 21, and then wrote the first draft over two days (Nov. 24-25). Not completely out of the ordinary for me; but certainly not commonplace.
It all just sort of rushed out.
And I’m glad it arrived in time to fit into the collection because several of those who read the collection pre-release mentioned it to me as the story that stuck with them.
It’s been haunting me as well. It feels like a gift.
And it is.
But it’s also not: a story collection isn’t just a group of stories.
It’s a chapter of the author’s life. A literary journey. An artistic project.
And so while Emma Travels West was a gift, it was also the culmination of all the writing I had done before. It’s the result of being able to deploy the skills and modes of thinking I’d developed by writing the other stories in the collection.
Not all of you will like it as much as my early readers, but I’m still excited for you to read it and all of the other previously unpublished and newly revised stories in the collection. And to read the previously published stories alongside them and maybe understand them in a new way.
I’m too close to it to know for sure, of course. But I think this collection works as a collection—as a complete set—of strange Mormon stories.
William Morris writes, edits, and writes about Mormon literature. His story “The Ward Organist” won Dialogue’s most recent short fiction contest and will appear in the Winter 2021 issue. More of his work, including an email series on Marden J. Clark’s essay collection Liberating Form can be found at motleyvision.org.