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HOWL - A New Generation of Writing Minds: Motion Sickness - Setting in Short Story

HOWL - A New Generation of Writing Minds

A Blog for Young Writers - Award winning Irish writer Gerard Beirne - author of The Eskimo in the Net (shortlisted for The Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award) and Sightings of Bono (adapted into a short film featuring Bono of U2) offers help and advice to young writers

Sunday, September 10, 2006

Motion Sickness - Setting in Short Story



Further to Forgetting Your Characters’ Names, we can only have a limited number of settings in the short story . We do not have space for more. If we are shifting around too much, travel sickness will ensue. The novel can cope, size wise, with much more settings. Just something to keep in mind. The whole fiction thing works on scene. It is the basic building block of narrative. Scene: characters in a particular setting with some action. So consider your settings carefully. They are limited and precious. Make sure the setting compliments the purpose of the scene. Don’t just stick your characters in any old place. Put them somewhere where it counts, adds atmosphere, evokes the emotion of the scene.
In the novel, we have more time to travel. More pages and more locations. But travel wisely. There are a lot of dangers in the world out there.

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