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My wife tells me that my epitaph should read, “NOW IT'S YOUR TURN TO TALK!”
The above sentence was the result of a self-imposed challenge to see how brief a piece I could write that would still be long enough to sketch a person and an interaction. Sometimes an easy grader when it comes to myself, I at first felt content, feeling that my super-short communication succeeded in evoking both my characteristic verbosity and the fraying of patience this quality calls forth in my wife.
However, I rarely rest content with a first understanding.
In actuality, the suggested epitaph arose not from my wife but from me. Yet had I not put the words in my wife's mouth, I would have been left with a sentence that sounded precious, one that appeared to have a smirk of self-admiration rather than a smile of interpersonal wit. The implicit dialogue between two people would disappear, leaving in its place the wearisome vanity of one congratulating himself on his own sense of humor.
If this were a first-person pronouncement, what would be even worse than the presence of my exposed vanity would be the absence of interpersonal interaction. Soliloquies that work, such as those created by Shakespeare, are not monologues but powerful dialogues between different parts of one person's mind. For writing to succeed there must be a give and take, at least an implicit conversation between a speaker and an emotionally responsive other. Lacking that is to be left with