My advice was "Tell me a story", meaning, basically, paint me the world and the people and make me care, because that's what "once upon a time" is all about. A majority of the professional writers - this amused me - offered up some variant of "butt. in. chair."

But my friend Laura Anne Gilman said, very simply, "Be true."

Yup. More broadly, if you have something in you that wants to be let out, then let it out, in whatever form it takes. Writing, painting, acting, dancing -- whatever. I guess that combines both "tell me a story" and "be true."

ION, Deb -- did you know that Tad Williams is writing a 6-issue comic series for DC? It's called "The Next," and is due out in July.

Damn, Sail. Just - damn.

Tep, I honestly didn't. Completely out of the loop, these days.

Y'all are amazing. Here is an attempt at what Deb said - truth and a good story rather than just a good story.

============

Doris

Newark, New Jersey: Shay is five. He is in trouble again. “Nothing they teach in that Synagogue makes sense!” he shouts. “I don’t want to go, and if you make me I’ll tell the Rabbi nothing he says is true again”.

Doris draws herself up to her full five feet of height. “No son of mine is going to skip schul, or – G-d forbid – get a reputation as an atheist.”

Willie clears his throat. “If the boy doesn’t want to go, why should he go?” Everyone stares. For Shay’s father, this is an extraordinarily long speech. He is a long drink of a man, mostly silent by necessity. He speaks little English, and to tell you the truth, even his Yiddish is not that good.

Shay no longer has to go to synagogue. He thinks that Doris gives in mostly out of surprise, and out of the fear that if she presses the point, Willie would also stop going.

Phoenix, Arizona: Shay is seven. The clean desert air does not seem to help Willie’s lungs, probably because he can’t afford to quit the only work he knows, tanning leather. Since Willie does not have the strength to put in a full day, Doris raises chicken and ducks, and (thanks to the WPA built irrigation system) watermelons.

It is hard work, and Doris never quite grows accustomed to the differences between Arizona and New Jersey. She screams when a rattlesnake gets into the fenced off yard; but the one legged duck Shay and his older brother Gerson have made into a pet kills it before it can do any harm. Shay and Gerson are relieved, and not just that their mother is safe. The duck is a hero now; he is also safe.

That night, Doris serves duck for dinner, duck with only one drumstick. “ G-d gave man dominion over all other creatures. Life is too hard for sentimentality. The sooner you learn that the better.”

Shay, Gerson and Willie all skip dinner that night. Doris eats heartily and sleeps soundly, replete with duck and righteousness.

City Terrace, California: Shay is 13, standing with Doris in the small graveyard behind the synagogue. They both adored Gerson. Everyone knew the hairline skull fracture he earned as a fighter pilot would kill him.

Doris turns to Shay. “You should have been the one to fight the Nazis. You should be the one who is dead.”

The next day Shay quits the high school football team and goes to work on the loading docks. He knows the shop Doris opened after Willie’s lungs gave out does not make enough to keep them, and they no longer have Gerson’s sick pay from the Air Force.

City Terrace, California: Shay is 16 when he catches Doris telling the girl he brought home, that she deserves better, that Shay does not really care for her, and won’t ever treat her right.

Shay has never had problems getting girls. Working on the loading docks has taught him to curse more fiercely, hold his liquor better, and smoke more elegantly than any other boy in the school. Lifting 70 pound crates eight hours a day has given him bigger shoulders than he had as a fullback. And though he is always in too much trouble to get good grades, it is only his behavior that brings them down; he always get an A on assignments and tests; his teachers never give him higher than a C for his classes though, because it is obvious to them that this is the grade he deserves. Two years from now he won’t be class valedictorian, but he will write both the male and female valedictorian speeches for them.

Shay has never had problems getting girls. But after he stops bringing them home, he no longer has problems getting second dates.

City Terrace, California: Shay is 20. The room is full for Doris’s memorial, but of Shay’s friends, not hers. The Rabbi delivers the eulogy, not Shay. Nobody wonders about this departure from the usual custom of the neighborhood. The Rabbi describes her as a “good person at heart, a diamond in the rough”. Everyone nods politely. After all, maybe (continued...)

( continues...) she really was a good person deep inside where nobody could see.

Wow, Gar, that's damn good. The last line's a killer.

That was very, very good, TB.

Shay has never had problem getting girls. But after he stops bringing them home, he no longer has problems getting second dates.

I absolutely love this.

Gar, you hit a deep, deep button in me there. My own mother's funeral was similar in feel - she was chilly and very unlikeable, and when the officiant had all four of us gathered before the eulogy, he asked for things he could say about her, since he'd never met her.

Four of us, and the best we could come up with was "she was a survivor."

Damn. Ouch. You did that well.

Thank you all. The slug about "workshopping" really applies to what you have done for me. I think your response to my comment on your story opened something for me. Also the simple technical point earlier about how to handle dialog helped me with a point I always had trouble with.

navel-gazing writerish cap

Dialogue is weird. A lot of writers say they prefer it, because it's so much easier than scene (creating the surround and the ambiance) or sense (sense as in, the feeling or engine power behind all those words). But I find a lot of writers are all about the talky-meat instead of the balance; the "he said, she said" becomes a substitute for actual action or, more importantly to me, interaction.

I mean, hell, when I take public transport, I have my iPod turned up to warp ten so that, among other reasons, I can block out all the annoying conversations going on around me, specifically the cell phone stuff.

For me, as a reader, I want dialogue to illuminate everything else the characters are doing, saying, feeling, thinking, being, forgetting. If it isn't about manipulating a light on their inner faces, why bother?

So I try for that as a writer, as well. I know I've trained myself very rigorously to use "he said, she said" as rarely as possible. There are so many ways a simple spoken sentence can advance the story, move the character down the road, show the reader something.

I'm all over that. It's one of the things I look for in feedback - if anyone notices unneeded talky-meat, I want to know. Which is very tricky in the current Kinkaid, because there has to be a lot of storytelling in this one: the crux of what happens is an elderly delta blues guy, with some beautiful stories of his own.

OK, removing cap. Sorry.

Yeah; well your writer cap is a big old help to me. Because you are right. People "talk" more through body language than words. Someone told me long ago not to worry about overuse of the word "said", that it was punctuation, not an actual word in the context of dialog. I always sensed that they were wrong, and back with my frothy horror drabble you showed rather than told me why. You made me go back and do it right until I got rid of the talky meat; and that was what I needed.