On Life as a Sarcastic Fringehead

I will say that I am unused to writing dialogue or any type of transitory text that gets my characters from one place to another. They usually just end up in the next place I need them to be with no real expository methods. But that lack of explanation was a main criticism of my earlier work and I'm trying to work through that now. My main fear is that the characters begin to ring false as they are talking, so I should just eliminate the talking altogether. And for a character to explain his feelings (except to dismiss them) as Stillwater is doing once he meets Parker is previously unheard of for me. I'm not a very sentimental person except in certain circumstances.

This is the first time since before high school, by the way, that quotation marks have appeared in something I've written and I absolutely positively cannot guarantee they'll survive the next edit. Quotation marks are too mainstream for me, I guess, and I tossed them right around ninth grade as being too cumbersome. But most times, our goal should be to communicate as clearly as possible with the reader even as we attempt to be unbound by rules and proper punctuation. It's a fine line and I hope I'm not compromising my personal writing style by floating toward normalcy.

A Raymond Carver short story that short story writers love to beat themselves up with:

For Sale: Baby shoes, Never used

He let the readers create their own backstories for this one. Brief, the most brief, really, but the imagination flies away with it. But since my story already has more than six words, I'd better be getting on with assisting the reader with the necessary explanations.