Writing emotional depth

This week I've been working on a rewrite of my novel Snowbird.  It's twenty years since I wrote the original story, and I needs a lot of work.  I referred to it in my archaeology of editing post back in December last year.  An early draft has masses of the heroine Jian's internal dialogue,all rendered in irritating italics.  They disappeared in one of the re- writes, but with that change I managed to wipe out all Jian's emotions too.

Which is stupid, because Jian's emotions drive a lot of her experiences.  Her parent we died when she was young, and the death of her mother in a decompression accident traumatised Jian.  She manages to cope with living in a orbital shipyard,but she carries an irrational fear that she too will die from asphyxiation.

In my bloodless, minimalist re-write I hadn't made nearly enough of her struggles to overcome her trauma,  nd she is challenge to deal with ait big time.  She's forced into a job where she has to do long EVAs on the surface of an airless planet, and don't show her struggling with that enough.

I've realised ask review my previous draft that I need to write up her emotional reactions to what's happening much more.  There are many places where she reacts too calmly to events and I need to show her panicking, and struggling to overcome that panic.

In the back third of the book she creates a sentient starship, Chilai.  In the early drafts of the book Jian's relationship with is new being got rather mawkish.  I wasn't allowing Chilai to show her own personality and strength.  And I hadn't decided on how much emotion the starship will show, and what sort of emotional journey she will go on through the story.

What kinds of fears, hopes, and dreams would a sentient starship have?  There's lots more work ahead of my deciding the answers to those questions.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.