Sydney writer Gretchen Shirm, who won the D.J. O’Hearn Memorial Fellowship for Emergent Writers in 2009, guest blogs for Readings about the story behind her new collection of short stories Having Cried Wolf.

I think Having Cried Wolf really began because I love the short story form, but also because I’m a frustrated novelist (I abandoned two attempts at novels before starting this book).

My first short works, weren’t really short stories; they were just pieces of fiction that happened to be short. It wasn’t really until I read a few very pivotal short story collections (Anne Enright’s Taking Pictures, Cate Kennedy’s Dark Roots, Anthony Giardina’s In the Country of Marriage and Anton Checkov’s stories) that I began to work it out. A short story is a beautiful thing; as a reader it can be very powerful because it works by what is absent; as a writer the short story is such a lovely form to work with because you can carry the whole thing in your head.

The first stories that I wrote in Having Cried Wolf were ‘Small Indulgences’ and ‘Moments’ and these stories seemed to have hooks on them. For example, there are two characters in ‘Moments’ who do inexplicable things and those things suggested other stories to me. That’s why I started to interweave the stories.

Some interwoven collections I’ve read (Tim Winton’s The Turning, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women) tend to focus on one character, whereas mine are more of a tangle. But I liked the way interweaving stories through events, characters and circumstance captures the idea of consequences, how one thing inevitably causes another.

My inspiration for stories usually comes from small things I’ve seen, heard or read about and trying to make sense of them. I’m sure many of the stories started from little fragments of things I’d read about in the newspaper (‘Breakfast friends’ and ‘Having Cried Wolf’ for example), although I only make those connections when I reflect on them later, rather than when I’m writing.

About halfway through, I had a slightly defeated moment when I reached a point where I thought I’d never be able to connect all of the stories without making them feel forced. I had been trying, so hard, to make them somehow all link up that I was distorting some of the stories – as it was I wrote at least 30 or 40 stories to come up with the fifteen that made the collection. And then, of course, as soon as I relinquished control, the dots started to join of their own accord. That was a very good lesson to learn as a writer.

People are never quite sure where to place interwoven short stories. Sometimes they’re labelled ‘discontinuous narrative’, a ‘novel in stories’ or a ‘short story cycle’. But I suppose I would like to think that these types of stories, because of the way that one thing can be looked at from many different directions, try to capture something that can’t be distilled either by a novel or a short story alone and do something different to both.

Having Cried Wolf is out now. Read the Readings review of the book here.