Where are they?

 This week I’ve seen two calls for submission of novellas, so I’ve dug out my two remaining novellas to look over before submitting,  I wrote these a few years ago, and now I can see why they weren’t picked up when I submitted them then.

Both novellas start with dialogue.  There’s nothing wrong with that, but around the dialogue the writer has to work in enough details of the setting to tell the reader where the characters are.  On looking back at both novellas, I see that I’d failed miserably in doing that.  Both start off with a blast of dialogue which moves the story along smartly, but doesn’t tell the reader where the story is set.  The characters are talking in a vacuum.

Both these novellas belong to a period when I was obsessed with starting stories with a bang.  I’d been reading a lot of stuff about the dangers of info-dumping, so I’d been determined not to do that in my stories.  But  of course, you can take that too far.

I’ve since realised that one of my weaknesses is a tendency to under-describe settings, and that was certainly the case in these two novellas.  So when I was editing I had to force myself to fill in the missing information about setting.  I had to force myself to slow the story down.

After the initial flurry of dialogue, which I kept in both cases, I now describe where my characters are.  This is basic stuff like which planet they’re on, the name of the place the characters are in, and a brief description of what they’re doing there.

In one of my novellas my main character heads up a marine food project.  She’s contacted by a security chief who also has a base on planet, and later she travels to see him.  The only location details I had were that the security base was an hour’s travel by skimmer away from my character’s project.  That clearly wasn’t enough, so I sat down to draw a sketch map of the coastline the two bases are on.  They occupy two headlands on the southern coast of the same continent, with dunes and a wetland in between.  All that detail got added to the rewrite, as did the location of  a deep-water harbour which was essential for the story.

The other novella wasn’t as bad.  There the location details needed sharpening up, with information like buildings being at the northern end of a flat-topped butte, rather than vaguely on top of a hill.  I also brought out detail like the deep gouges in the rock caused by the talons of giant bioengineered birds taking off and landing there for years.

I’m much happier with my rewrites.  Now my characters exist somewhere, and hopefully my readers can now see them in their homes.