Conversations with Calliope

JOE: Good morning Calliope.
CALLIOPE: Good morning Joe. How are you today?
JOE: A little weary. I spent most of yesterday working on revisions of Marital Property.
CALLIOPE: How is it coming?
JOE: I forgot how much work revising a novel text demands. It seems to take forever although I think the quality of it improves with each edit.
CALLIOPE: That's encouraging. What's the hardest part.
JOE: Knowing what to do with the verb "to be" and all its forms. It makes for dull writing but I can't always easily find alternative ways to express myself.
CALLIOPE: Maybe it's just a bad habit.
JOE: Maybe so, but I'm working on it.
CALLIOPE: How are you going about it?
JOE: Mostly by reading The New Yorker, Salman Rushdie and others who might teach me by example.
CALLIOPE: Anything else?
JOE: I just try to keep focused on finding better ways to express myself. In my last novel, I avoided almost all conversation tags and found other ways to denote the speaker.
CALLIOPE: Do you think you could write a whole novel without this verb. "To be or not to be. That is the question."
JOE: Very funny, but I have considered it. Could I do it? Maybe I can write a short story in that fashion. One is brewing in my mind about a woman in Martha's Vineyard. Maybe I'll try it on a smaller scale. See you tomorrow.
(Parliament Building- London)