: Re: What should tie a collection of short-stories together? Short-stories are a nice format to write. If you have been an aspiring writer for at least one year, it's quite probabile that you've

@Nimeshi163

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The most common and easy way to identify which stories belong together is the genre as you have already identified. Therefore I won't say anything more on that topic.

The next common way is to have the same topic. You are free to choose whatever topic you find interesting here: the standard The Hero's Journey (Warning: TVTropes link ;) ) can easily be placed in a sci-fi setting, or a fantasy setting or basically any other setting you find interesting.

Or you could make stories about cats. I like cats, so I could write about fantastical cats with supernatural abilities rescuing the world, a short-story about the problems of a cat family living homeless in our present-day world and a comedic view on how cats will surely rule the world in a couple thousand years due to them being absolutely adorable and awesome.

Or maybe you have a sword that played an important in your first middle-age short story as the great "dragonslayer". And in the next short story you are looking at the importance of such a valuable object for a collector in the present setting.

You get the idea: if you have one central topic you might find readers interested in that particular topic who don't care so much about the genre or want to get a quick look at other genres that they may have not read so much until now.

Another option would be to go abstract. "Only stories with 700 to 800 words", "Never mention the gender of the protagonist", "Always try to imagine the scene from the point of view of a dog", ...

You need golden thread - but what exactly that is is up to you. Just make sure your readers know what you are up to and what they should expect.

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