Spontaneous Dialogue

“I’m not Solo by choice. Or at least, not entirely.”

“I doubt we’ll be getting any local customers today. Consider me a safe space.”

“My sister lives in a different state, and she’s the one with the grandkids. My parents moved there when they retired. No one ever thinks about the six-hour drive, or the cost of plane tickets, or how I’m never around on Friday nights or the weekends or how I’m never around outside of work; they just whisper about how I’m not involved in the daily care of my parents.”

“My partner and I wanted children, but we can’t have them, not even with fertility treatments. We can conceive, but we always lose them in the first trimester. ‘Abnormalities incompatible with life’, the doctors say. No one ever asks, they just see the lack of children, and wonder what’s wrong with us.”

“My daughter is too young to help with the kind of expert caregiving my mother needs, and I’m a widow with no siblings. Everyone else is too busy with their own parents and children. I’d love to be able to handle it myself, but I can’t.”

This was part of the original draft of my story "Burnout", which explored a world where Work-Life Balance was valued and taken seriously, and its drawbacks. I wound up cutting it in order to not completely annihilate the word-count limit, but it's a good example of the self-editing process.

In this case, I wanted to explore what a world that uplifted commitment to family responsibility would look like to people who couldn't have or didn't want families, or people already struggling with existing responsibility and reluctant to take on more.

Often, when I'm not sure where I want to take a story or if I'm suffering writer's block, I'll deal it by writing a conversation between characters. Dialogue flows easier if I don't have to think about why they're saying things, just what they're saying.

In this case, I wanted to strike a balance between grief and frustration, to touch on the many reasons why people might not have children, or might not be as involved in caring for elderly parents as they might wish. With raw emotions, it's much better to write out the dialogue first, then add in the descriptive text, plot progression, and so on.

Dialogue is important, too, otherwise you've just got a wall of text describing things happening, all tell and no show.

At some point, I may re-visit this short story amd turn it into a proper novella, exploring the differences of a world where traditionally female and unpaid labour is valued equally to paid work. I already know that the world building won’t be a small endeavour, and I’ll have to be careful that I don’t end up with an entire anthology of scene setting short stories, like I have in the past.

Still, anything worth doing is worth doing well, and that goes for writing and editing as much as physical tasks. Like this short story, we will see what the future holds...