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.

Not a Drabble, or even on topic, but here. For your amusement. Or mocking - which ever.

Bored - A Poem

Bored am I.
I am Bored.
Time needs to pass
more quickly, Lord.
There isn't enough
to keep me busy.
Customers are few;
I'm going crizizzy.
I'm usually swamped,
with cars to loan.
Today I have neither
and no ringing phone.
No book to read,
no emails need response,
so I compose this bad poem,
and keep my boredom ensconced.

Thankyewverymuch.

Sail, I have to confess....I don't understand what's going on in your drabble.

BWAH! Good morning, empress, and may I suggest one small change, for rhythmic flow?

Tep, the picture I got from Sail's was her and a guy, playing an ongoing video game, her being better at it than the guy was, her feeling the need to somehow excuse that she was better at it than he was.

The scores started diverging, she began apologising.

That was the picture in my head, anyway.

BWAH! Good morning, empress, and may I suggest one small change, for rhythmic flow?

Please.

That's what I got from Sail's drabble also, along with the idea that her trivia scores were going to make her unwelcome in the In Crowd.

Dialogue's tough. It's double-tough. Characters can't talk like people really talk (proven to me by recording every conversation around me for a couple days), and yet to be realistic they can't say exactly what they are thinking/feeling either.

"There isn't enough
to keep me busy.
Customers are few;
I'm going crizizzy.

For the scan (scansion?):

There's not enough
to keep me busy
few customers
I'm going crizzizzy.

Keeps the two-two rhythm. Why yes, I have been writing a book section dealing extensively with bembe drumming and the clave rhythms Bo Diddley made famous...