Combining Individual Stories Into Larger Wholes The inclination to combine individual stories into larger wholes goes way back into oral tradition. In the literary world this kind of story linkage is known as a short story cycle, or sequence (various other names exist but these have caught on). It is not a collection of isolated stories but collections of stories with common themes, imagery, and tone and often with common setting and characters. The boundaries distinguishing a collection of short stories from a cycle are often blurry. In his studies, Forrest L. Ingram has defined a cy