This sentence, when all is said and done, is definitely too long.

Thinking about it some more, I could have just said "this sentence is too long."

And when you get down to it, the above didn't need to be there either. Nor did this. Or that. Hell, I could go on all day but I'd lose you to a more intriguing column.

Why are writers such wordy sons of bitches? Give us a forum - stage, screen, book or column - and we'll fill it with the one thing we love most: the sound of our own voice. We'll turn phrases, build clever wordplay and construct elaborate setups from fluff and nothing.

Hell, I'm doing it now.

And if this were the opening to a movie, you'd have snuck into the next theatre to see something else about two minutes ago.

So let's discuss editing the sound of our own voices.

One thing right off the bat about writers: Writers write - and hate to edit.

A publishing company approached me to adapt a work of literature into a 144 page graphic novel. Said piece is narrated from the point of view of an animal - which allowed the author to wax philosophical from within and around the protagonist's mind. Now, that's well and good for a novel that allows for space, breadth, length and verbosity. But for a digest sized comic, in which each page can fit four panels or less? Gotta pick them words carefully.

Let's talk superhero comics for a minute: How many times have you waded through an issue of Super Monkey Detective Comics and gotten stuck in captions, exposition and balloons that obscure painstakingly detailed artwork, simply because the writer wanted to blather on about Super Monkey Detective's forensic study of Shadow Goat's death?

I've seen it a thousand times and my eyes always skim over the gray text until I happen upon a ninja fight.

Years ago, a well-known writer advised me that the average comic book panel should have no more than twenty to thirty words in it. My editor on the above graphic novel asked me to limit that down to fifty words per page. That's a lot of editing, especially for someone who loves to write dialogue. Even more so for one who digs Mamet-style back and forth dialogue.

Another word for "editing", in this case, is "economy." How can a writer say something, but revise it so that he's saying it with three less words?

Columnist Erick Hogan once asked me how writing plays was different than comic books. In my answer I said the following: "In comics, there's an economy of words not present in stage/screen. I can write a ten-minute monologue in a play that can't translate onto a two-page sequence in comics ... You think more economically in theatre in relation to what you can and cannot do; you think economically in comics in relation to what you can and cannot say - or how much you can and cannot say, really."

I could have said the same thing in about ten less words, by the way.

As a writer, you have to pick your words carefully, because you have very little time to get a reader's attention and very little space to do it in.

Ever heard the phrase, "kill your darlings"? I heard it at a writing panel four years ago and it's probably the greatest piece of advice I can pass along. Here's why:

Really, writers don't hate to edit. How can you hate doing something you'll never do in the first place? Most writers -- myself included -- write a first draft, step back and proclaim themselves the Second Coming of Jesus Shakespeare. Every writer thinks that his first draft, the pure draft, is the best and anyone who tampers with it is tampering with the space/time continuum because, by god, the world depends on a Bush joke being in That. Exact. Sentence.

But, dude... that Bush joke is in the fifth word balloon on the seventh panel of your page. The reader doesn't know who's saying it because all of the pithy dialogue is covering up the artwork!

So it isn't that writers hate to edit. Writers hate to be edited.

Writers hate to be shown that their picture perfect dialogue needs to be three lines shorter in order to fit on the page. Writers hate to be told to change "Now you will surely die, Captain!" to "Die, Captain!" for the sake of letting us see who said that. Each word is, as Josh Braff said in a recent novel, a jewel. A diamond. A darling. How can you even think of killing my darlings, Cruel Demanding Editor?

So, here's a tip for you - and me, because it's something I still have trouble with:

Good writers? They know how to edit. They know when to edit. They know why to edit.

What are some of your favorite comic books? Who are some of your favorite writers? Flip through books by top selling writers like Warren Ellis and Mark Millar and you'll see that vast sections of their books are laid out with little to no dialogue. Then you'll get tracts of dialogue for a page or two followed by a page with two or three words on it. Build. Release. They're top selling writers because they know how to capture a reader's attention, utilize an economy of words and create a balanced story.

Any writer can do it. Any comic book writer can avoid laying rivers of text and dialogue down on a page and any screenwriter can learn the delicate balance of extensive monologue and dialogue-free action sequence.

Last time I went on about the wonders of Brian Michael Bendis. Now, sure - Bendis' dialogue contains killer patter and he definitely has a ear for how people talk. But he do go on, don't he? Sometimes the eye glazes over that "Yes" "What?" "I didn't -" "But, I thought you said--?" "No." "Really?" "Stop."

I just re-read Kevin Smith's "Guardian Devil" story line from the Daredevil book, and found it very hard to get past the first three pages of dialogue. I felt like my mom, years gone by, when she watched Smith's movie, Clerks, and said "Don't they every shut up?"

They do go on. And on.

Back in the day, one of my stories was placed in an anthology alongside several of my friends. Only three of us had stories that were illustrated by other artists. Upon discussing the book with other participants, I was told that my story was the one that wasn't written for the sake of writing. The story was told quickly and cleanly. Not that it was necessarily any better -- but the others were just so overwritten, mine stood out, I suppose.

Brevity. Show, don't tell. Definition over supposition. Get to the heart of the matter quickly, efficiently and economically. Don't use the words "seems", "like", "simply" and "try" and examine what you're writing so you cut an eight word sentence down to five.

Learn to kill your darlings. I, for one, still am. Otherwise this column would have been finished with four words, three pages ago:

Shut up and edit.

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BIG POND is a collective column that begins with ideas and continues with opinions. Each column focuses in on my musings about writing for the comic book, film and television industry and then gives way to opinions on the week's topic by a diverse group of writers.

This week, we're joined in the pond by Leland Purvis and Steven Goldman, two writers who experiment with storytelling style and the limits of what dialogue can do within the frame of the comic book page. Here are their thoughts on this week's topic:

Leland:"I think you've overlapped about six notions here that muddy up when you try to hit them all at once. Runaway verbosity is a different issue from crowding a page. Editing for effectiveness is different from editing for space. Editing dialog is worlds away from editing a short story or, say, an essay. Comics dialog can be different from any other kind.

"Real editing isn't about making work shorter, it's about making it more effective. Often long, involved descriptions aren't nearly as effective at evoking the response the writer is looking for. So, keep-it-simple-stupid becomes the sad replacement for make-me-feel it.

"The reason many writers over-write their material and fill it with fun, pithy clever catch phrases and all isn't that they hate to edit or be edited. It's that they love language. The sheer miracle of the printed-word hefting meaning simply slaps them with wonder. They're so gobsmacked with the fun of language itself that they forget that their first job is to translate material from their minds, where it is of course oh-so-interesting, to my page, where it's often not. Part of what needs to make the translation is the writer's earnestness. If the writer felt a thing was worth writing, I had better agree after having read it. Getting more wrapped up in the language than the meaning is putting form over function.

"Bad ju-ju in the whole communication department. Go look at a Jackson Pollack.

"Over written material can often lead to too dense a page, as far as comics go. Chaykin's old notion of using one index card per page is not bad. If it won't fit on an index card, probably you're crowding your page. No one ever accused Howard of decompressed storytelling. In comics, page density can be an artificial control of pacing (not to be confused with timing.) Image density can do the same thing. Ever wonder why there's so little text in a Geoff Darrow comic? He's doing it with the pictures. If you're cutting way back on the text, and you don't want them to read your phonebook sized graphic novel in fifteen minutes, your images had better be a lot more packed. If you have too much text, is there a way you could be doing this more effectively with the images? This is a visual medium after all. And text heavy comics may be caption heavy or may be dialogue heavy.

"Dialogue in movies is very different from plays and from dialogue in a novel. This is one reason why wordwrights in one medium often prove themselves Gilligans in another. Comics dialogue can be very like other kinds and can be very different. One of the tremendous powers of putting down both words and pictures is that if you write the images just-so, you don't have to put as much in the text. You can use less. Better, this nifty text/images juxtaposition can allow you to follow multiple tracts of story and layers of meaning where the picture stream is on about one thing, the text on another, and a third layer where they cross-pollinate. This is one reason why the Marvel style of plot-to-pencils-to-script used to have a different feel. The dialogue is where we get a sense of people.

"When writing dialogue you have to keep two things in your mind at once 1) the throughline of meaning that the two, or more, characters are wading through, and 2) the reader who's slogging with them. But the reader may be developing an understanding of a plotline that the characters are already aware of, so those are separate issues. If the characters are distinct in the writer's mind s/he has an upper hand in having their voices come off at least as distinct as their hats. Which is important because if the only reason these two are talking is to tell ME something, I had better learn more about them than what they have to say to each other. And that has to come from how they get their ideas across.

"Really compelling written dialogue isn't like real conversation. Real interaction is filled with interruptions, grammatical gaffs that go unnoticed, and huge amounts of repetition and rehashing because people often feel like they aren't being heard. The authenticity of the exchange speaks to character. And if I don't have a sense of who these people are, I'm got going to care enough to keep turning pages.

"The whole notion of simpler-is-better comes from Hemingway. Occam's Razor applied to literature. Let's be careful here. Simpler is not always the most effective. The right phrase may say volumes about a person when they're saying it. Sometimes just the right metaphor can do all the work of pages of explanation. It can make the reader feel it. If you kill my metaphor for the sake of your brevity, I will hate you and the reader will feel gypped and disconnected.

"And if you can give me a metaphor with pictures and a few words that makes me stare at my campfire and chuckle and rattle the ice in my glass, I will love you."

Steven:"(Neil asks the guy who crammed so much dialogue into a graphic novel that it made Aaron Sorkin's eyes bleed... okay, okay, so it's Comedy Night here at Big Pond.)

"Editing your dialogue means not just stripping it down to the fewest words - because that pursuit on its own can easily suck all of the individual voice out of what you do - but in being specific. Know your character's voice as well as you know your own, so that how they speak informs us as much as what they say. If you can cover up the art and still make out that different characters are speaking to each other, you're doing something right.

"Also, if you have a lot of exposition to convey in your work, learn something from stage pacing. Don't bludgeon your reader with information. Know that actions are just as important as verbal cues in revealing a liar (a panel of someone silently hiding something incriminating) or hitting an emotional beat without talking about it. Show, don't tell. Know that what you imply is as important as what you outright say.

"For example, you can write a scene where a husband tells his wife at length that he doesn't love her any more (and why) while he packs a suitcase, and leaves the house as she cries (also at length) at the kitchen table. Or you could have her watch him silently, incredulously as he packs his bag, share a few terse statements that let us know something about why, and show him take off his wedding band sadly, regard it (and maybe her through it, for folks who like lining up a nice shot), and then coldly put it down on the table in front of her, her eyes staying on it, not him, her tears welling up. We could hear the door slam without seeing him leave, and you now have a story that is relatively terse, but says plenty about the state of their relationship.

"And know when to just shut the hell up. Seriously. If your antagonist doesn't have anything to say to a protagonist, then don't have him say anything. Sly or sullen silence speaks volumes. Let the face or eyes say it all. Give your artist a challenge by putting emotional beats into the panel description for him to apply to characters, if you've got a clear enough idea of what they should be. Learn from writers like Kazuo Koike; know when to use the silence of a "..." and let the reader draw the subtext out.

"But make your dialogue have a point. If there's none, like a bad joke or a throwaway idea that feels like a speed bump when you reread, get cutting. Cut until it's lean like a jaguar or purposefully slow-moving like an elephant."

The column doesn't end there, though - head on over to the The Big Pond forum at the Scryptic Forums and add your opinion to the Pond! Join the collective column and talk writing with myself, this week's contributors and the rest of the Scryptic writers.

My thanks to Leland and Steven for taking the time to offer their thoughts on dialogue here at the last minute. Check out their graphic novels for some of the most intelligent and thought provoking comics you'll read in a long, long time. See you back here in two weeks for the last word on dialogue.

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Neil Kleid won the Xeric grant for NINETY CANDLES, an experimental graphic novella, and his first graphic novel, BROWNSVILLE, (with artist Jake Allen) debuts from NBM Publishing in 2005. He is currently writing URSA MINORS!, a four issue comedy mini-series for Slave Labor Graphics. A graphic designer by day, Neil harbors notions of writing full time. Weep for him.

Leland Purvis is a Xeric Grant recipient, an Eisner-Award nominee, and a self-taught comics artist and writer. He has a B.A. in Ancient History which was earned so long ago as to become a part of its subject matter. He is sharply and deeply opinionated but has learned to avoid starting fistfights as they tend to get in the way of stories, art, and amiable social drinking.His major works include the self-published anthology, VOX, a creator-owned limited series called PUBO published through Dark Horse Comics, and the rendering of a 240-page comics biography of physicist Niels Bohr, called Suspended In Language, written and published by Jim Ottaviani.

Steven Goldman writes STYX TAXI, a series about NYC's only taxi service for the dead, and co-wrote the political graphic novel EVERYMAN and stories for Media Blasters' FLESH FOR THE BEAST anthology with his brother Dan. Currently cooking are the first STYX TAXI graphic novel and his first play, CROSS-STITCH, with a novel to come after that.