Ever since America's Next Top Model aired it's last intellectually stimulating episode, my Wednesday's have been barren and empty. No more Tyra to correct my posture or tweak my strut or do whatever it is she does that makes me alternately laugh and cover my eyes. Fortunately as fate would have it, while channel surfing I stumbled onto my new favorite show. It's called Creature Comforts and it cracks me up. There's actually not much to it. They take real live interviews from various people across the country discussing everything from body image to flying. Nothing special about this in itself...but here's the catch: Instead of showing the people giving the interviews, you hear their words coming from different claymation animals. I couldn't stop laughing. And this got me thinking about why this was so funny. Yes, I'm a sucker for claymation of any sort but seldom does it make me shoot Diet Coke through my nose. And then I realized it wasn't what they were saying so much as how they said it and who was saying it. For instance they had a female pig talking about body image while her mother (also a pig) stood in the background throwing in "helpful" mother-type comments from time to time. A talking pig and her mother. *snicker* Okay, maybe I've been watching too much Nickelodeon.

This also got me thinking about the characters we create in our books and how, if we're not careful, they turn into nothing more than Talking Heads (and no, I'm not referring to the 80's band, though I'll wait if you feel the need to hum a few bars of Burning Down the House). Talk Heads pop up when all you have are lines and lines of dialogue without much else to enhance the scene. Good dialogue of course is essential as long as it serves to move the plot along or shed some insight into the minds of our characters. It doesn't always require dialogue tags or action. But, again, it's not so much what our characters say as how they it. A look, an expression, a tiny movement, even the background of the scene, can all serve to enhance the dialogue and put a frame around it. What a character is doing while they're speaking can reveal just as much about them as a person as their actual words.

So what's my point after all this rambling? Tune into Creature Comforts Mondays at 8:00 pm on CBS. You might learn something. Or shoot soda out of your nose. Either way, somebody will be entertained.