Writing Wildly: How to Turn Experiments into a Cohesive Book
"Don’t worry about your experiments not yet forming a whole."
Welcome to our weekly column offering perspectives on lit mag publishing, with contributions from readers, writers and editors around the world.
When I began publishing flash fiction nearly a decade ago, I had no idea what I was doing. I was a Dutch novelist with limited experience writing short form prose and knew nothing about the American literary market. I branched off into flash mainly to get comfortable writing in English (my second language) and get a few quick bylines to boost my bio. I didn’t see flash as a landmark on my author path.
But I was wrong. Flash was my gateway into the transformative world of editors and expert readers. Not only did writing flash improve my craft and connect me to cherished author friends (two related topics for another essay), it also taught me how to better evaluate my work.
As a novelist living in Paris yet publishing in the Netherlands, I rarely met the people who bought my books and hardly ever received spontaneous messages from readers. I had average sales figures in a small market yet couldn’t really tell how my stories failed or succeeded in touching others.
There was also a gap of about two years between the moment of creation—let’s say: a novel’s first full draft—and the book’s arrival in the store. By the time people commented on what I’d written, my mind was already occupied by another book, and I was hesitant to look back.
In the world of short prose, readers and writers are in constant communication with one another. Once I began submitting my work to literary journals, I received a lot of rejections. We all do, I assume. I tried not to take it personally. Occasionally, I received thoughtful feedback from magazine readers and editors that helped me understand what was holding a story back. When I was lucky and saw my work published online soon after submission, I enjoyed seeing readers’ reactions to what I’d written—instant gratification!
Of course, the praise was nice. Praise makes us feel good about what we create and encourages us to keep writing. But the greater value of the lit mag world, I believe, is what we can learn from the submission process, from our acceptances and rejections. By seeing what works and what does not, we can become aware of our capabilities.
In the world of short prose, readers and writers are in constant communication with one another.
From Gambling to Experimentation
Drawing lessons from the submission process takes time and perseverance. Although I tried to match my stories to the magazines I was reading, anticipating what editors might want to publish, it all felt like gambling to me. Why was my story about a homeless woman in Amsterdam rejected by twenty lit mags and the one on killing a moth accepted overnight? Did it have to do with length, subject matter, or quality?
The reception of my work online equally mystified me. Sometimes the stories I’d worked on hardest got little traction, whereas the ones I’d written in one sitting, in a burst of energy, ended up in anthologies and best-of-the-year lists. Was this all by chance and circumstance? Perhaps it was the weather.
Not being able to predict how my writing was perceived didn’t deter me. I actually felt motivated to experiment more with style and voice, throw more unknowns into the mix. I did so not in the hope to please others—their tastes couldn’t be anticipated anyway—but to please myself. I began writing for fun, flexing my author muscles. I wrote atmospheric stories with no discernible plot, humorous instruction manuals, and multiple-choice tests in imitation of Alejandro Zambra. I wrote stories based on prompts, for specific themes, or in celebration of someone else’s work. I wrote different versions of the same story, changing perspectives, chronology, setting, or characters. I even wrote three one-sentence stories of 300 words as a dare.
In short: I wrote wildly. Which is not to say that I was submitting stories in a rush. Submitting unpolished pieces, untried by the power of retrospection and meticulous editing, is a bad idea. You don’t want to clog up the system and waste an editor’s limited time with half-baked prose. You also don’t want to risk seeing a flawed piece accepted and having to live with it being published for the rest of your life.
What I mean by writing wildly is that I wrote without knowing what purpose the story might serve in the long run. I had no end goal. I wasn’t writing toward a collection. I was writing to see what I could do and how what I did affected others. By expressing myself freely, I was discovering what I had to say.
Writing like this can take the sting out of rejections. When we consider a piece of writing an experiment, we may feel less hurt about it being turned down. We simply move on to another idea that hopefully resonates more. In this way, rejections can help us recognize our strengths and weaknesses.
By expressing myself freely, I was discovering what I had to say.
When the Pieces Don’t Fit Together
The downside of writing wildly doesn’t become obvious until we try to put a collection together and notice the pieces don’t fit.
After six years of writing flash, I thought I was ready to publish a collection. I had enough stories with over half of them published, and had acquired a few nice accolades along the way. But when I put all my stories together into one document, I panicked: There was nothing that held them together. My stories were very different from one another, because that had been the point. All they had in common was the experimental spirit with which they’d been conceived.
Some writers are ingenious when they write wildly. Their unfettered creativity somehow leads them blindly to a unified body of work. This was not the case for me. Still, I stubbornly forced my stories into a collection and submitted it to a few publishers. I tried out different selections, sequences, and titles for my manuscript, playing that gambling game again. But no luck. How could I find the cohesion I knew publishers wanted?
That’s when I went over my old submission files again. I searched for the stories that had been the easiest to place with magazines I loved and were then well received by readers. Did these stories have something in common that could become my glue? Most were unique pieces that seemed to have been selected and liked for unique reasons. But I was also reminded of the existence of two stories published in matchbook that had received an exceptionally warm welcome early on. I had always longed to develop a series from these stories yet never got around to it. What if I did so now? What if I made these two stories into pillars for my collection and wrote several other pillars to hold the whole thing aloft?
I set to work. I wrote two more “pillars” and submitted them to a few lit mags. This time I was lucky: Two top magazines (Wigleaf and Fractured Lit) wanted to publish my work. I wrote a few more stories in this series and added them all to what was now looking like a real collection. The pillars gave the book a recognizable structure and pulled the other stories into their thematic realm.
When I was done arranging and rearranging, one of my favorite indie publishers, Vine Leaves Press, had a submission window and I sent them my manuscript. Three months later, I signed a contract. My first flash fiction collection will see the light in July 2025: Woman of the Hour: Fifty Tales of Longing and Rebellion.
You may be much smarter than me. You may be aware of market demands and are already writing stories that will later neatly form a collection. I admire authors who can do that and plan ahead. But I also admire authors who seem to reinvent themselves with each story and write with more than one voice. To the latter I’d like to say: Keep going. Don’t worry about your experiments not yet forming a whole. With a bit extra work in the end, a bunch of seemingly unrelated stories can become a cohesive book after all.
All you have to do is practice your craft and have some fun.
thank you so much for this enlightening article. Back some years, I got one maybe two articles accepted in a lit mag. And then I got caught up in writing for me. I gave up even trying to submit anything anywhere. All I knew was that the time spent on submissions was time taken away from writing, as if submitting doesn't require writing. That's when I turned to Substack,Now I find myself working on segments of a memoir, Yaya Speaks. At first I wanted my work to be polished, but I gave up on that as well. I decided to publish second drafts. I feel it's a gift to me and a gift to readers to witness the vulnerable side of the craft. I thought, "hell, I might die before I get the thing polished, and I have to get it said. Thanks to Substack I have my journey documented. Now I need to dust of my worn out feathers and learn to fly, or at least try. Who say seventy five year is old? Certainly not me. Thank you for your inspiring article.
Ah, Clare. This has been my experience with flash, too. I started trying the form out maybe two years ago, then threw myself into studying it and writing it about a year ago. It is exactly the "wild" stories, written fast, written furiously, that seem to be most successful finding homes in literary magazines. It has confirmed something for me that I've long suspected: the back of the brain knows a lot more about story than we allow for when we depend on our conscious minds to organize "meaning." Congrats on the collection.