Short Stories: Where They All Came From

 Let's take a Look at My Short Stories and Wonders Where They All Came From

Short stories are sneaky little things.

They do not arrive with trumpets. They do not knock politely at the door and say, “Excuse me, Rebecca, I am about to become part of a much larger problem.” No. They creep in sideways. They appear in notebooks, in computer folders, in half-named documents, on scraps of paper, and sometimes in the middle of making a cup of tea when I had absolutely no intention of writing anything at all.

Mine did not just multiply.

They formed a colony.

At this point, I have written fifteen books of short stories, each one holding sixteen stories. That is 240 stories gathered into books, which sounds wonderfully organised until you remember there are still others wandering about the place like sheep that have found a gap in the fence.

Some stories became books. Some became blog posts in their own right. Some were too short to fit comfortably into a collection, but too alive to throw away. Others, if I am being honest, went nowhere at all. They began with enthusiasm, looked around, and quietly sat down in a corner.

That happens.

Since I began writing my proverb stories, the short story pile has grown in a different way. A whakataukī will catch my eye, or my heart, or that awkward little part of my imagination that likes trouble, and suddenly there is a spaceship, a child, a strange planet, a corridor, a guardian, a broken rule, or someone standing at the edge of a choice they did not expect to make.

That is the beautiful trouble with proverbs. They are small, but they carry old bones. They look simple until you sit with them. Then they open a door.

Some of my stories belong together in books. They have found their place, lined up neatly under a title, behaving themselves as if they were always meant to be there. Others are more independent. They suit the blog better, where they can stand alone for a moment, wave at passing readers, and say, “Here I am. Make of me what you will.”

I rather like that.

Not every story needs to become part of a collection. Not every idea needs to grow into a novel. Some stories are meant to be brief. A proverb does not need a thousand pages to carry weight. A single sentence can hold a mountain if it has been polished by time and truth.

The blog has become a good home for those smaller pieces. The ones that are not quite long enough for the books. The ones that do not fit the pattern. The odd little creatures. The experimental ones. The stories that arrived wearing mismatched socks but still had something to say.

And yes, there are still the abandoned ones.

Every writer has them. The half-started tales. The promising openings. The characters who turned up loudly and then refused to do anything useful. The worlds that looked interesting from a distance but had no roads once I got there.

I used to feel guilty about those. Now I think they are part of the work. Not every seed becomes a tree. Some feed the soil. Some teach you what not to plant again. Some simply prove that you were writing, thinking, reaching, trying.

The proverb short stories have taught me that small does not mean slight. A short story can hold courage, grief, memory, humour, warning, kindness, and wonder. It can take a reader to the stars and still bring them back to something deeply human.

That is why I keep writing them.

Some are about courage. Some are about small things that turn out to matter. Some are about family, survival, memory, strange worlds, stubborn hope, and those moments when ordinary people become braver than they expected to be.

Some stories arrive fully formed.

Some need coaxing.

Some are best left alone in the long grass.

And some, the cheeky little things, become books before I realise what they are doing.

So no, I am not short of short stories. The cupboard is not bare. The cupboard is overstocked, muttering, and possibly breeding in the dark.

But among all of it — the books, the blog posts, the unfinished scraps, the odd experiments, the ones that worked and the ones that absolutely did not — there is a pattern forming. A trail of small lights. A collection of proverbs, places, people, and choices.

A universe built one short story at a time. And somewhere in the middle of it all, I suspect there is another story already tapping at the window. Of course there is. There always is.

- Rebecca V

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Stories, stars, strange futures, and a little mischief between the galaxies.

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