Get to the /point/, a minor revelation

[joshua neff]

Right. Good point, Chris. As Ron said above, there's no good filler--if it's good, it's not filler. There's a point to it, a necessity.

[Eric.Brennan]

My games, as recently as a year ago, suffered from the going nowhere syndrome you've described.  Sessions of doing nothing but acting and posing by my players, which, as (I discovered), was them trying to get something to happen...something interesting, something meaningful to fill up that empty space between important events...or to rephrase, something meaningful to fill up the space between meaningful events, something important in between the important events.

Sounds incredibly stupid, right?

"We need an important event to happen, but we can't let an important event happen." Talk about working at cross purposes with yourself!

You've just described a lot of the awful games I ran a few years ago at the height of my "story crafting" stage.  It's certainly the reason why I felt the whole "get to the point" thing as an epiphany.  

Thanks,
Eric