Thursday, July 19, 2012
Being
Caught short: the novella
It was like this. Having spent ten years
writing Azimuth and pouring into it
everything I could regarding the metaphysical, the fabulous, the adventurous
and the quirky so that it became an adult’s fairytale without fairies but with
gods and heroes; no that sounds a bit of a put-off, as well - allegorical,
that’s the word. Oh, read it and be enthralled and tell me what it is! Anyway,
like any long term relationship come to an end, I soon needed the thrill again.
So I wrote Through a Mirror Clear: a
Gothic Love Story about taboo in family life. Meanwhile, I continued to
market books through these blogs and tweets but the old yearning took over
again and I have just today finished Sex:
Future Imperfect, a science fiction novella.
Novellas are an interesting form. You
haven’t time to really develop characters through action but have to make them
rounded enough to be believable, immediately. It’s akin to going to a party and
chatting with someone and ending up in bed with a relationship to look forward
to, it seems so right. They must jump off your page ready formed in the same
way. Also, in my case there has to be more of a sense of the ending at the
outset to help drive direction. Normally I refuse to think about it, wanting
the characters and the events to push the plot along and discover for myself the
ending almost at the same moment as it comes into sight on the page.
In novellas, too, there is a bounty placed
on every word you don’t use. Spareness counts. The plot drags you in and spits
you out, even if it is a psycho-drama. In the case of science fiction, a future
world has to be painted in a few sentences and it must be sufficiently
technological for the reader to feel that time has moved on and that it is a
believable step away from the present. Anyway, I suppose the novella should
feel that it could have been a fully-fledged novel but there has been a
distillation which gives it the punch of a glass of spirit.
From what I’ve read, the novella is the
medium with the message for today’s computers who want to read a whole story in
a day. The sound byte generation. We shouldn’t be snooty about it. At the end
of the day we are providing a service, a refueling of the imagination.
All the books mentioned above can be found
at:
and in one form or another on Amazon Kindle
where I write as both Jack Sanger AND Eric le Sange
Labels: #Writing: the novella.
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