Vivid locations, deftly sketched, are part of the contract we establish with readers that our story is authentic. Especially in long-form fiction, they are one of the subtle supports for persuading the reader to suspend disbelief and immerse themselves in the story.
In one-off flash fictions, passages of description may sometimes be minimised, due to the compressed nature of that individual form. But in a novella-in-flash, your settings and locations can have a more meaningful role in building story and atmosphere, through the gradual accumulation of detail across chapters. Plotting out your settings and locations on a map can also be a fun way to bring to life the novella you are imagining.
It can be helpful to
think about your settings as if they were characters or entities in their own right. What’s more, a piece of description is always more than just description. It reflects the emotions and inner world of the protagonist or observer. The way human participants relate to their physical environment contains dynamic narrative potential.
Photo by Andre Benz on Unsplash
Vivid, specific and unusual details can make scenes feel alive. Flash fiction writer and editor Randall Brown refers to Charles Baxter’s concept of ‘defamiliarization’, encouraging writers to focus on what’s unfamiliar and atypical about a location, the aspects of a scene that seem idiosyncratic, rather than giving the reader predictable and predetermined details. (Randall Brown, Pocket Guide to Flash Fiction (Wynnewood: Matter Press, 2012), pp.128–136)
Invitation: Pick one of the following prompts and write a new scene/story for your novella, or (if you prefer!) try sketching out some “notes-towards-a-story”, perhaps via the creative mind-mapping technique that Liz Berry talks about in this article.
- Take a character to a location/landscape that’s physically or emotionally dangerous or risky. How do they respond?
- Show a character in a landscape that’s full of vitality/abundance or ruin/decay. How do they respond emotionally? How are they prompted to interact with it/act?
- Write a story where a character crosses or fails to cross a boundary of some kind (to go somewhere off-limits, forbidden or hidden)
- Show a character settling down or choosing to settle down somewhere and treating this place as “home”. What emotions do they feel?
- Show a character escaping/trying to escape/wanting to escape. What are they needing to escape? How are they feeling? Are they successful?
- Show a character returning to somewhere that’s very familiar to them, after a long time away. What emotions do they feel?
- Show a character arriving somewhere that’s completely new and unfamiliar to them. What emotions do they feel?
- If your character(s) live(s) in a city, take them to the countryside (or vice versa). How do they feel in that new environment? How does it make them behave?
OPTIONAL: Consider using vivid, specific and unusual detail to bring to life the spirit of the location itself, and explore a character’s reaction to (or interaction with) the location. By the end of the flash, does the character realise something (about their environment, or a relationship or their status in/connection to the world)?
Above all, “make it new”!
Would you like some help with a novella-in-flash you’re writing?
Find out about Michael Loveday’s mentoring options here: https://novella-in-flash.com/course-options-available/
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