For God's Sake, Don't Say 'Hello'

Written dialog is special, meaning it's absolutely nothing like the blathering we usually do day-to-day as human beings. For every thousand sentences you utter in life, perhaps one could earn itself a place in your novel.

Your co-workers and I expect you to say Hello and Goodbye during the course of a business day, but they beg you--and I beg you--not to bore us with that crap in your novel, or short story, or poem.

Why?

Simple. Fiction is conflict. Fiction is drama. Fiction is not workaday chatter.