“So how’s that book coming?” an old friend asks, choosing her words carefully.

“Oh, it’s fine. You know, plugging away.” I opt for cryptic, visibly uncomfortable with this line of questioning - she’s always been the superior writer, composing prose that pours on the page like top shelf scotch into a crystal tumbler. Meanwhile I’m more a disciple of the “Spew Words Onto a Computer Screen And Pray For Coherence” school of literary theory.

“How much have you written so far?” You can’t miss the archness in her voice.

“Oh, I don’t know. A lot, I guess. You know, all that dialogue. It takes up space.” I shrug noncommittally.

“Really?” She tosses her head. “I have to think that if I were writing a novel, it would have next to no dialogue. I wouldn’t want to get bogged down in all those boring exchanges. I mean, what does it really matter what people say?”

I feel my hackles rise - or maybe it’s just a reaction to excessive caffeine. “Uh, so you’d write about people who don’t talk to each other?”

“I just mean I’d stick to concrete things - descriptions, impressions, thoughts. Compared to that, what people say to each other just seems so banal.”

“But what point is there in telling a story if it’s not about what people say to each other?”

“I just find it fundamentally uninteresting. It’s such a tiny part of what’s going on in the larger scheme.”

I laugh in her face, then open my mouth to apologize but the following comes out instead: “Not to be rude or anything, but I think that’s a crock. What we say is everything. We live in a reality created by ourselves and the people around us - the act of communicating thoughts and ideas through spoken language is the only way we have of making it all real. Ideas, thoughts - none of it would exist without language, and the only way to get them across is to speak. Who someone is to me is made up of what they say, or what other people say about them, or what I say to myself about them. Without dialogue, characters don’t exist.”

Now she’s seething, obviously insulted. Unsure of how to deescalate the tension, I keep on babbling. “Unless, of course, you have some universal observer third person narrator, who goes on and on about the color of the sky or whatever and eventually talks about people without ever giving them a chance to get a word in edgwise. But that just seems selfish, you know? Characters can make or break themselves based on what they say in certain situations - it seems unfair not to give them a chance to do it.” Somehow that doesn’t seem to help.

With a razorwire smile, she pulls out her cell phone and checks for messages, the universal sign of detachment. “Well, I guess we’ll just be writing very different novels.”

“Yup. And in yours you can name the annoying character who won’t shut up after me.”