Writing Talk: Basics of Dialogue

In 1999, I was driving on the New Jersey Turnpike. The car behind me tapped my bumper, sending me fishtailing across several lanes, and under a trailer truck, which sheared the roof off the car. I got out of the emergency room with a lot of stitches in my scalp, but otherwise unharmed, and then had to get home to Brooklyn, which was an adventure in and of itself.

Honestly, I don’t remember a lot of it. I recall thinking this was it, and wondering how much dying would hurt, in what seems in retrospect a surprisingly calm moment.

Since then, I’ve had trouble driving. I have panic attacks on the highway and even as a passenger, trucks pulling up alongside send my heart rate up. It took me a long time to realize this was affecting my life. It took me even longer to admit to myself I had PTSD and needed to work on it. It was very weird for me to realize that I couldn’t just think my way out of a panic attack.

So this summer I’ve been driving in when volunteering in the Clarion West classroom. It’s not a bad drive, but it takes me on a highway, and across the 520 bridge, which was way outside my comfort zone at the summer’s beginning. Now it’s a lot more endurable, but still scary, and I don’t know that I’ll ever get to a point where I feel comfortable on the terrifying part of I-5. It wasn’t pleasant when I started, and it’s still not pleasant. But I pushed myself, because I didn’t want fear to make my life smaller.

By the same token, we need to not let fear circumscribe our writing. We need to write about things that obsess and confuse and frighten us to the point of nausea. We need to tell stories about the things that scare us, and what we do when we’re scared. Because this is how we confront and transform the abysmal moments in our lives. We are the laboratories in which our stories brew and bubble, and the ones distilled from our pain will be better than the ones imported from outside sources.

You can write anything in fiction. Go for it. No one knows where your life ends and the fictioneering begins, so use the material life gives you freely, gleefully, fully. Face the themes that terrify you and write your fears out without worrying about who will read them. It may not solve them, it may not make them any less scary, but at least you’re using them. And your stories will be so much the better for it.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

This is the YA SF novella (?) I’m working on.

Synopsis: Stella’s life is on the unusual side, but whose isn’t nowadays, half a century after the Fall that led to this ruined landscape with its mesh of mythology and machinery? Still, being brought up as part of a troupe of circus performers wandering along the coast of the Inner Sea, going from small village to small village, sets her apart from many.

Even more alienating is the fact that she doesn’t know who her parents were. The others in the troupe deny any knowledge of them, and so Stella feels herself a stranger among them, particularly as adulthood draws near and she must figure out what her role with the circus will be.

When one of the circus elders reveal that Stella’s mother was, in fact, a circus performer, Stella must navigate feelings of betrayal, new responsibilities, and her mother’s legacy of magic-enhancing technology. When she fails to control her temper and half the circus burns down as a result, she’s ejected from the only family she’s ever known.

Accompanied by a village girl named Abacus (Abbie), the two strike inland, hoping to find the city that Stella’s father was rumored to come from. Their ingenuity and bravery are put to the test as they battle minotaurs, mutants, and other perils created by the crumbling technology of a long-gone scientific age.

When they finally come to the city, they find it deserted, much to their despair. But that night they are seized and taken to find Stella’s father, who lives far above on the space station. Abbie is slated to be the human sacrifice who will “pay” for Stella’s admission to the station, but when they find out they manage to (with great peril and suspense) flee to an abandoned lunar colony, where they come face to face with the greatest challenge of all: the aliens who created the Fall.

From the first chapter:

#sfwapro