My Editing Journey: Dialogue in Discovery

I'd said one of the things I needed to do was change Ann's way of speaking. Let's explore that today.

Dialogue is a great way to show your character: their education, their interests, their thought processes. Sometimes, as the character develops in your mind, her way of speaking changes. That happened to Sister Ann. An orphan rescued and raised by the Sisters, she has an unusual background and a mind like a sponge. She can absorb and process technical manuals like a child's game. She does the same for other writings, but philosophy and psychology are harder for her to understand. Her experience with the outside world is limited to living at the convent and rescuing spacers. Her faith is strong and at times, visionary, but she's never thought much about it being unique.

As the ship and its crew get into deeper danger, she is receiving Divine Guidance through the help of prophets and saints. This was such fun to play with, but since I didn’t set her up as a mystic and a little odd, it looks like she's gone mad. Also, I needed her to be more odd to begin with to justify the crew's reaction to her, particularly Dr. Thoren's, who considers her a threat to their mission.

The best way to show this is in her speech (and later in her interior monologues). Here's one of the first conversations she has. She's just quoted Brother Jubal about his life as a hermit on the moon.

Original:

"Yet God called him to go minister to the Drake Lunar station. He left the life he loved and as a result, came to love life more. But could he have done it if he hadn't had that revelation of God's love? Then, there's St. Gillian: she loved the grandeur and beauty of Earth. She grew up on a ranch and used to go riding in the mountains--on an animal!"

"A horse. Lots of people ride horses on earth."

"A horse! Yes! But her husband got injured when the gravity generator he was developing blew up, and could never return to a heavy gravity world, and she came out into space to minister to him. For love, she could do it, but it was love for her husband."

Rita wondered if the change of subject was to ease her own fears; if so, she welcomed it. "But her faith in God and her hope that He would bring something good from her sacrifice gave her the strength to live on L5. And of course, with her help, R Charles perfected his gravity generator."

"Her nagging, you mean!" Ann laughed. "Have you ever read his dairies? They're very funny." Her voice deepened as she quoted, "'I finally just went to work so she wouldn't keep telling me about the martyrs. Martyrs! Torture! A shrew for a wife--that's torture!' She knew he needed to work to take his mind off his pain, and she loved him enough to risk his wrath and make him do what he wouldn't do for himself. Despite his grumbling, he understood that, and he loved her all the more. Human love is a powerful force, too, isn't it?"


See how she's very straightforward in her expression? It also feels too much like telling. I have to admit, the conversation bothered me from the beginning, but only until I knew Ann better did I understand why. Here's the second draft:


"Yet God called him to go minister to the Drake Lunar station. He left the life he loved and as a result, came to love life more. But could he have done it if he hadn't had that revelation of God's love? Then, there's St. Gillian: Nowhere do I feel closer to God than watching the sunrise across the mountains. God made this world to suit us; and us, uniquely suited for it. She rode animals."

"Horses. Lots of people ride horses."

"And shrews ride people."

"What?"

Ann's voice deepened as she mimicked a man's snarl. "'Research! Work! Give your pain to God!' Vaccing shrew rides me like one of her horses. R. Charles Hawkins was very cranky after his accident. He wanted to give up work on the gravity generator and die, and Gillian left earth to be with him full time at L5. I guess it's easier to ride someone in zero g."

Rita had long broken the habit of smacking her own forehead, but times like these brought back the urge. "I think he's speaking figuratively."

This is more "Ann": making some leaps of logic that no one else understands (R. Charles called his wife "shrew" + she rides him = shrews ride people), shows her literal thinking, and isn't as straightforward as the first conversation. It's also 100 words shorter, an advantage.

My Novel's Journey: Reactions and Writing Group Reactions

You're on an asteroid mining team has just been hired for a secret mission. Your supervisor will only tell you that it's the most amazing thing you'll ever do and that it'll pay a wonderfully obscene amount of money plus a percentage of what you recover.

Your team boards a ship heading to the edge of the solar system. You find it populated with a minimal crew and a bunch of scientists who lord it over you like you're some kind of ditch digger from Earth. No one will tell you anything until the mission commander (an astronomy professor who's enjoying his time as King of the Hill) decides to brief the entire team.

The time comes--and you learn you're about to excavate the first-ever discovered alien spacecraft.

How do you react?

This is the question I was struggling with for Discovery. My group of miners were on the ship Edwina Thomas heading to the Kuiper Belt for a week before the Rescue Sisters could join them, and only then would Dr. Thoren agree to brief everyone. In the first draft, he had already briefed everyone but the sisters, but I thought it'd show his controlling nature to make them all wait. Besides, it'd be fun to write the reactions.

I wanted a range of reactions, so I asked some of my favorite groups. I got surprisingly similar answers. As one friend summed it, "Fear or excitement. that's about it."

But is it? There's denial, stunned silence, awe, even greed for what they might find and sell. (In this future, which has become highly commercialized in the academic circles, that's actually the prevailing motivation: how can this turn a profit and improve my stature?) Then there're those like Sister Thomas, who simply look at it from a practical standpoint; or Sister Ann, who immediately empathizes with the aliens who have died and starts praying a rosary for them.

And of course, humor, because I don't write anything without a little bit of fun.

It's always interesting to ask questions like this and see what ideas you get, but when it comes to writing, you have to know your characters' personalities to get their reactions. No one can dictate those for you.

Fave Phrase: Here's how the scene panned out. I don't see Thorem saying "all right!" so I need some more pompous exclamation for him.

"Ladies and gentlemen--"

He put a hologram of the alien ship.

Sleek and dark against the gray of the asteroid, the ship rested. Six arms, like crescent moons arched away then back toward a roughly ball-shaped center, then ends of one settling on the join of the next, except for one that was half-buried under rubble from the crash. Even after months of studying it, Kris never tired of admiring the design, or what it meant for humankind:

"--we are not alone."

There was a moment of silence, then.

"Oh, vac! How long are you going to yank our chain?"

"He's serious, Harper," Hayden said.

"You're kidding right? Why wouldn't we have seen it by now?" Fred Harper griped.

"No one's looked!" Kris said. He almost yelled; the answer seemed so blindingly obvious. He pulled up another hologram--this one of the solar system and the route taken by the Seeker probe. While he tried to explain about the probe and how he'd happened upon this discovery, the miners started talking amongst themselves. Some were hooting with joy, others shaking their heads, but a few were snarling. Did they think he was still lying? He kept talking, but cast an uneasy glance at Dr. Thoren.

Hayden snapped, "All right, people, focus. You can gripe about the bet later."

"--on the far side of the asteroid when it crashed-- Wait a minute. You had a bet?"

"Sure. On what we were digging up."

"And I won," Dale Michaels said smugly.

"Right and I don't believe for a minute you--"

"Mr. David!" Sister Ann spoke up. "Your ship didn't crash. Did it, Tommie?"

Sr. Thomas mashed her lips together a moment, then said, "No. It's not a great landing, but it's not a crash. An uncontrolled collision and that ship would have blasted that rock apart. Instead..." She got up and walked to the display. By setting her hands on the section she wanted, she was able to rotate it toward the miners and enlarge. She pointed to one area. Kris walked around so he could see as well.

"Instead, you have this one spoke that's dug into the side of the asteroid. They had to have been going pretty slow at this point, or they'd have sheared off that part of the rock. More of an angle, and they might have caught and flipped. Of course this is all looking at it like a human pilot."

"What if it's an anchor, like the screw on a MiGR?" Sr. Rita asked.

Sr. Thomas was looking over the ship carefully, causing the miners to holler for her to move away so they could see. "I don't see much damage at all. Are we sure it's a ship and not a station?"

"Uh, we're really not sure of anything," Kris answered. From the corner of his eye, he saw Andy grinning. Did she wink at him? He looked hear way, but she'd turned to the youngest nun.

Sr. Thomas grunted. "Hope for a ship. Easier to move."

"I'm all for easy!" one of the miners called out and promptly received a number of derogatory comments from his peers. Side conversations started as the miners, now accepting that these people at least believed they'd found an alien ship and weren't pulling some kind of sick practical joke, speculated on what they'd find, how they'd extract it...

The noise rose, but Kris didn't care. Interspersed among the mundane discussions of equipment and procedures, he heard comments like "I hope it's a station; we'll see how they lived," "What do you think they looked like?" and "Can you imagine if we find..."

Some people were almost shouting in their excitement, but under it was the whisper Kris had longed to hear: kindred spirits...

George Powers, a loudmouth even in the best of circumstances, stood and hollered, "I cannot believe we are going to be the first to encounter aliens! Actual Goddamn, fuckin' aliens!"

Sr. Ann stood and turned on the miner. "Shame on you! We don't know what God's plan is for those poor souls."

"Or how they reproduce," Galen added dryly, causing the room to erupt with laughter and a speculation of a different kind.

"All right!" Thoren called out. "Let's get back on topic, shall we?"