All Kinds of Love: Inside the mind of an editor putting together an anthology
How do you put together a collection of stories about relationships that is properly inclusive?
Love is the starting point, not the be all and end all.
I’m not interested in ‘boy meets girl, loses girl, gets girl back’. I want every shade and permutation of love. I definitely don’t want a collection that is overtly heterosexual and I want it to be neither saccharinely cute nor steamily sexual. I want stories to challenge everything I’ve ever read or thought about ‘love’.
I want real characters (even if they aren’t human) with real lives: just because the stories are around 2000 words, doesn’t mean I can’t know everything I want to know (and nothing I don’t need to) about this person, and why you’ve chosen to tell me this particular story about them.
Every word should count: it should be weighed, measured, right.
I want lovers who are old and young, happy, ecstatic and confused; I want angry lovers, lonely lovers, I want despairing lovers. I want gay, I want lesbian, I want straight; I want the past and future, I want cheating and I want honesty; I want you to tell me a heck of a lot of lies.
I want love that crosses cultural divides, universes and belief structures.
I want adventure and I want comfort, I want the very beginning and the very end.
Every story should add something unique to the collection, should garnish and complement, balance and challenge every other story. (I am not ‘demanding’, what do you mean, ‘demanding’?!)
The collection as a whole should create an implied narrative of its own, with twists and turns and crescendos and interludes and … and a cracking finish.
I want to love every story as though it had been written especially for me. Now get out there and write it.
Oh. You have? That’s … uh … well, thanks.
(See if I got what I wanted here. Richard Smyth will be joining me in reading from Lovers’ Lies at the Leeds Book Fair on Saturday 27th July at 10:30)
© Cherry Potts Arachne Press 2013
