"This is your typical lazy, sloppy, late-period Callan type of story," she said.

"Ow. That hurts."

"No, I'm really serious. You've gotten so lazy lately. You expect to just sit down in front of the keyboard and have great story concepts come to you. You expect to just put them down in beautiful prose like a conduit directly from the muse to the world."

I replied, "Now wait a minute. Writing is very difficult. You have ideas or you don't. And you have to get the ideas from somewhere. They have to come out of my head. Otherwise it's mere mimicry. Plagarism."

"I appreciate all that. Really I do. My point is independent of that. My point is that you've lost your work ethic in writing. You take these half-formed ideas and commit them to paper soon as you have them. You aren't working at it. You just write whatever comes to mind."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "I can't believe what I'm hearing," I said. "It would be very useful if you could get more concrete."

"Sure, that's reasonable," she said. "Let's take the instance of dialogs. You've stumbled upon this very useful form of the unattached dialog. It's a nice structure that lets you do a lot. And you went through the realization that there is value in winnowing away everything that isn't a part of that dialog. Bravo. Hooray for you. That was good work. That was work. But now you've done that. Now you've made the progress you're going to make in that area. You should go out and do some new work. But instead you just keep up with the same thing. Disembodied dialog after disembodied dialog flows out of your keyboard. Where's the innovation in that?"

"It's not that simple," I object.

"Wait. I'm not finished. You wanted examples, so I'm giving them to you. Then there's the self-reference thing. Again, a useful technique. You've done a lot of neat self-reference pieces over the years. Not only explicit self-referential statements (like in the case of this paragraph here that begins with 'Wait. I'm not finished.'), but also the technique of creating a fictional situation that directly mirrors the real circumstances surrounding the fictional piece in question. Again, that's great. Wonderful. But again you're stuck in a rut. You're writing the same stuff over and over again. Again.

"Or for my last example, let's talk about this recurring female character in the dialogs. She's clearly a very educated woman, someone who has the critical and literary background necessary to discuss aesthetic matters with a hyperformalist like yourself. A character who's clearly based on me. Who is this woman? What's her background that she's so into this stuff? What's her relationship with the character representing Ptim Callan? Is she a lover? A mentor? A friend, a co-worker?"

"That's purposeful," I say, "It's intended to be evocative."

"But I don't think you do it because it's evocative. I think you do it because it's easy. It's easy to not flesh this woman out, or lots of things out. It's easy to say, 'Oh it's supposed to be evocative. I'll let the reader's imagination fill in the blanks.' All you're doing is taking the easy way out. That's how you can average more than a story a week. That's how you get so many stories done. And why they're usually so short. You come up with a single pearl of an idea, and that becomes the entirety of the story. You don't want to spend the time on any of the surrounding structure. You cut every corner you can cut. All you want to do is the part where you put the words down and make up the plot. You don't want to research or think things through. You don't want to work."

"Wow. That's quite an indictment. Give me a kiss."

"It's too late for that now, Mr. I'll-resort-to-anything-to-get-out-of-the-corner-I've-painted-myself-in-this-time."

[Note to me: Come up with some sort of cool ending.]