Drag Queen Dragon Queens

I've been "teaching" dialogue for my fiction workshop (oops... fiction nonworkshop) this week. I don't really teach anything so much as poorly construct diagrams on the whiteboard and hope that I get little high off the dry erase marker while doing so. But I wanted to make the point that realistic dialogue in writing is good, but that's a lot different than real-life dialogue (which is often mundane and cyclical), because writing dialogue has to do other things. You know, like tell a story or advance the narrative or characterize a dragon. And a lot of times, "realistic" dialogue in 206 shows up with a lot of "Ums," and "What's ups?" in phone conversation, and just things that probably aren't necessary for telling a dragon story. So I was thinking about recording conversations and talking about how they would be useless in stories for the most part. And suddenly I started to become hyper conscious of whether anything that I said would be useful in a story, which is tricky because I'm already hyper conscious of how 10% of things I say are actively dirty and probably another 50% could be construed as dirty. It was overwhelming, so naturally I passed this concern onto Amber N. on our excursion to Target, aka TheTarg, and to see Funny People on the first ever Cheap Movie Friday.

Alas, my teaching strategy backfired. Here are some lines of dialogue that would be useful for any writers of fiction, from James Joyce to John Grisham.

"You know what I did today? ....Watch My Fair Lady."

Amanda: "Here are those Junior Mints I mentioned."
Amber, in response: "Our lives are better than most other people's."

"There's a man smoking in the dumpster at the Big Bun."

And imagine if there was exposition! and crafty detail! Ah jeez! Such narrative excitement!