Be a Talker, only not as Much

Sketch: Summer evening, open windows, waiting for the printer to print some sign-your-life-away-papers. Realtor: Bespectacled, swept-back gray hair, incessant talker but good at it.

We ought to talk more, you know? He says. Talking is an art. As a kid, I’d sit of an evening on the porch and listen to the old people talk. The neighbors would come and sit till bedtime, just talking to pass the time. They’d tell the old stories over and over. But come television and air conditioning, nobody was a-walking the streets looking for shade or stories.

I’ve heard a lot recently about community. It is unfortunate that we must work to generate a sense of solidarity among a group of people, because it implies a lack of it. But I’m for community. It’s a path for human flourishing. 

The quality of any community is rooted in the quality of its conversations; the conversations about itself, about the rest of the world, about the future, the past. It’s the ebb and flow, the give and take, the measure of forbearance and love. It’s our highly developed communications that distinguish us from animals. You occupy your world, and I occupy mine, and the only way for them to overlap is conversation.

I’m not much of a talker, myself. I’m bad at it. But after listening to this ambassador of the last generation postulating that we need more talkers, I decided it was time to work on my ability to hold a conversation without boring the audience. Here’s what I learned. While not exhaustive, it’s a place to start.

Humility is your friend. You’re a smart person, and you know it. That’s the trouble. Most people don’t want to hear you pontificate on quantum mechanics or postmodernism in twenty-first century literature, they just want to know what’s in it for them.

A good talker tailors his flow of knowledge to the needs of the people listening. It’s the mark of a good talker who is conscious of the needs of his audience, more than his own desire for catharsis, who does not say everything he knows but says what is necessary and relevant.

Humility, however, does not force anyone into silence. It’s an act of humility to venture your thought into the predatorial world where bigger and better brains want to gobble it up. It’s life. It’s a spot of vulnerability, if you’re aware of your own capacity for ignorance. Just laugh at yourself, and thank the person for setting you straight.

Be humble. The world is bigger than your brain.

Be thrilled to learn. This is the most humble act of all. Emerson said “Every man is my superior in some way, in that way I learn of him.” When we thrill at knowledge from others, we become their student. People love this superiority; indulge them.

Be thrilled when someone proves you wrong. Not only is this an act of community, but they are refining your grasp of the subject. It  also establishes your credibility. Concession to someone else’s view proves that you have loyalties outside your own narrative, and therefore makes the rest of what you say more believable. The person who is never wrong is usually suspect. 

Don’t be always right. We find it hard to believe.

Keep it short. Few care that a particular story happened a week ago, on Tuesday the third of November at 11:15 a.m., and you were driving your blue truck with one hand on the wheel. Irrelevant details obscure, relevant details sharpen. Distil your thoughts, be respectful of other’s time, sketch the story into its shortest and most vivid form. We don’t love the sound of your voice as much as you do. Brevity is the soul of wit. Shakespeare said that, so it must be true. 

Say what you want to say. Get it over with.

Listen. Arguably, this is the most important and the most difficult. You can be a brilliant talker, but unless someone can listen and understand, you have cast your pearls before swine. It is the mark of a mature listener who can listen to understand rather than to spew half-cooked answers.

Try this: Next time you are listening, do not venture an answer before you have restated, in your own words, what the other person has just told you to their satisfaction. Forcing our ideas through the bottleneck of language forms our thoughts into concrete shapes and gives us something to work with. 

Listen. Everyone comes out a winner. 

Talk about the other person. People love to talk about themselves. So either talk about others or put the conversation between you, resting on an idea so that you both have the focus off of yourself. As much as we love you and want to hear you out, we don’t want the mundane details of your life to fill the entire evening. We must force ourselves to listen after about five minutes. Which is our duty, but that doesn’t make it fun. 

Cultivate precise speech. This one is close to my heart. Avoid words like thingy and super and awesome and words ending in ­-ly. Those words are worn out and retain little meaning. A train is not a choo-choo. Slow down. Use names, use words of absolute value. 

Whenever we us an adverb, such as really or literally or very, we admit a scale. There are only three positions on that scale, the three degrees of comparison: positive, comparative, and superlative. (Good, better, best.) Not everything can be best (superlative degree), because it’s too dramatic even for boorish tastes. Most adverbs fall in the category of better (comparative degree), which only establishes it as middling and unmoors it from any concrete position because we haven’t established the extremes. Use positive degree; state the facts, then back away quickly, allowing the statement to hang in the air between you. Then be quiet. Let the fruit of your statement ripen in silence. Too many words obscure the thought.

Let your yea be yea and your nay be nay. 

Silence is fine. William Burroughs said, “Silence is only frightening to those who are compulsively verbalizing.” 

Have something to talk about. If you’re going to be a useful member of the conversation, and help keep it from devolving into gossip or other inanities, you’re going to need to do some footwork. This means you will need to do some private thinking, develop some theories, and form some opinions. Read some books, and think about them. Listen to some audiobooks, or sermons, or something, anything. Even podcasts, if you must. Then try out your theories in conversation, and be humble enough to modify and adapt your ideas to your community. Use them to poke, and pry, and provoke. And be humble enough to know when you’ve been beat.

Be a conversationalist. It makes us humans.