Clients quite often ask me for recommendations of novellas-in-flash featuring speculative, fantastical, magical realist, or science-fiction elements. The honest answer is that — as far as I’m aware — there have been only a few so far. This means there’s a huge opportunity for all you writers out there! An opportunity to be pioneering the growth of a developing genre within the novella-in-flash — because, as you’ll know from the market for more traditional genre novels, speculative / fantastical / magical realist / science-fiction styles of writing are enormously popular and have very devoted a ..read more

William James and the Constituents of the Self William James, brother of novelist Henry James and diarist Alice James, was a leading 19th century philosopher and one of the founders of modern psychology. In his book The Principles of Psychology (1890), a publication that is often credited with making the idea of “stream of consciousness” more widely known in Western culture, one of the things he does (in Chapter 10) is name and describe three distinct aspects of human experience: the material self, the social self, and the spiritual self. Photo by Marty O’Neill on Unsplash Story writers ca ..read more

What do the objects and random detritus contained in a character’s environment say about that person? Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash Here’s a wonderful, award-winning story from Sara Hills in which a character is partly understood by the belongings encountered in their room: https://www.smokelong.com/stories/hey-lisa-i-hope-you-like/ Notice how Hills describes the narrator discovering new things about the character, through the objects she encounters in his room. The narrator feels she ought to have known these things already, and her sense of the other person is therefore destabilis ..read more

Today’s blogpost develops the recent theme of going further with the settings you use in your writing. We’ll approach the topic from a fresh angle by exploring the work of the Anglo-Irish poet Michael Longley, to see what can be learned from him more generally for writing about physical environments of all kinds. (NB See here and here for two other recent blogposts about making the most of settings in your writing). For those who don’t know Longley’s writing – a brief intro… Longley was born in Belfast in 1939 and worked in Belfast, Dublin, and London before retirement. Along with Seamus Heane ..read more

Recently I’ve been considering this principle more than ever before: the action of writing about place is always political. This truth perhaps feels like it has even greater and more tragic resonance in our current era, where landscapes are territories strongly contested by multiple forces, yet it has manifested in so many different ways throughout centuries of world literature. Some writers already have an inherently politicised relationship with landscape because of their personal connection to a particular location – whether as a birthplace, or as “home turf”, somewhere that a person has ro ..read more

An update for blogpost readers: Unlocking the Novella-in-Flash: from Blank Page to Finished Manuscript (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2022), has now received recognition in a sixth international book competition – this time winning its category in the Best Indie Book Awards 2023: Non-fiction: ‘How-to’ Books. The craft guide provides a foundation for my mentoring here at novella-in-flash.com. I poured into it as much as I could concisely offer on the subject of writing fiction, and wrote it sustained by a long-nurtured enthusiasm for creativity generally and the art of writing in particular. I also tried to ..read more

I’m very pleased to announce that the craft guide Unlocking the Novella-in-Flash: from Blank Page to Finished Manuscript (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2022), which forms the basis of my mentoring programme here at novella-in-flash.com, has now received recognition in a fifth international book competition – this time winning the Cadmus Book Award for ‘Non-fiction: Crafting/ Hobbies/How-To’ books. The book has also won the Reader Views Awards 2023 Silver Medal for Writing/Publishing, and was a Finalist in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards 2023, National Indie Excellence Awards 2023, and International Bo ..read more

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 s ..read more

What happens in your storyworld when you throw your characters into unfamiliar situations or put them under pressure – how do they react? Photo by Hu Chen on Unsplash Think about which aspects of character a pressurised/unfamiliar situation might uncover: (a) What flaws of theirs might be exposed? (b) Or in what ways might they thrive unexpectedly? (c) And what might then follow on from EITHER (a) OR (b), for the ongoing story? Here are some methods for stretching your characters beyond their comfort zones: Your character crosses a physical boundary of some kind (to go somewhere off-li ..read more

Last weekend at the annual Flash Fiction Festival in Bristol, England, one of the workshops (‘A Blast from the Past!’) was an introduction to the historical novella-in-flash, a category of novella-in-flash that seems to be increasingly popular. In fact, among all the literary genres that could possibly be adopted within the novella-in-short-short-stories, it seems to be historical fiction that is emerging as the most prevalent so far – more so than science fiction, fantasy, crime, magical realism, and so on (and leaving to one side for now the standard mode of contemporary realism in ‘literary ..read more