Daniel Menaker | A Good Talk

“Show, don’t tell” is as good a rule for conversation as it is for writing fiction (and many kinds of nonfiction, for that matter). And perhaps the most chronic forms of  conversational telling–especially among Americans, it seems to me–is what I call Amazingism.  Well, OK, I don’t call it that–it’s dumb and almost unsayable–but I couldn’t  come up with a clever name for this kind of talk.  It consists of the incessant substitution of exclamations of wonder, admiration, and approval for actual details and narrative.  “Amazing,” “great,” “astonishing,” “stunning,” “fabulous,” etc. are all perfectly serviceable words, but their overuse in conversation denatures them and also fails to convey what exactly all the excitement is about, because it reduces the use of what might truly impress a listener–specifics.

So if I say “We had an amazing day at the zoo today–it was really great!” would you be more interested in that, or in “We watched a chimpanze work a combination lock at the zoo today, and saw a turtle as big around as a truck tire”? There is an ethos of enthusiasm among many people I know, and it often leads to dead-end conversation, as a home run often dispels the tension of an exciting inning, even though it is exciting in itself.

The irony is that those who are listening to you will almost always be more impressed if you use these vague terms of amazement sparingly–just say what in particular was so amazing.  And if you do use them, use them in summary, at the end of whatever details you’ve just described–not as a premise that you then have to go ahead and try to prove.

Tags:Word Choice
Filed under: Talky Talk by Daniel Menaker
Sunday, August 8th, 2010 at 2:57 pm
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A few nights ago, I went to a reading by Gary Shteyngart, the young novelist prodigy and someone I signed up and published at Random House. I tell you that because it’s important to the conversation lesson, as you’ll see, and not because I need to brag on my acquisitions (which also include National Book Award Winner Colum McCann, Pulitzer Prizewinner Elizabeth Strout, and genius bestseller Nassim Nicholas Taleb, not that I’m boasting or need to have more credit for the work I did at RH. Heaven forfend!).

Not surprisingly, quite a few of my ex-colleagues attended the reading, and afterward I talked to some of them, and even though I knew they were there essentially for business reasons, I kept forgetting that important conversational fact. So when they asked me how I was and what I was up to, I actually told them, in fairly great detail, and I expected similarly specific answers from them. I found myself going into detail about the new dog at my house, and about what my kids were up to and so on. In one or two cases, with real friends, that was all fine, but in a couple of others …

What would happen after a minute or two would be the beginning of the eye-darting.  Any dependent clause (“Well, when my new dog  Maxwell came home…) seemed to set my listeners’ eyes to wandering, checking out the room, seeing how long the book-signing line was, and so on. The attention being paid to what I said became increasingly nominal–eyes returning to mine for a second or two before darting off again to the crowd–and the answers to my questions grew briefer and briefer, almost to the point of telegraphy.

How rude!, I thought–here I’ve made this trek down here to Union Square, far from my place on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and my former associates are treating me like…well, like a nuisance. Nevertheless, I made my questions and answers shorter, restricted my real conversation to one or two friends with whom I had a real connection, and went home, not exactly disgruntled, but certainly even less gruntled than I had been when I was telling myself that my motives for going to the reading had nothing to do with my own vanity.

How rude, I said to myself again. And then it dawned on me that though in fact there was rudeness involved, it was mine, not my shifty-eyed colleagues’. The moral here is that if you see this ocular restiveness in the person or people you’re talking to, don’t necessarily take offense–unless they really are by nature inattentive and impolite, and never really listen to anyone except themselves. You may be the somewhat rude one, mistaking the context in which you are having such conversations.  The reading and the new book, “Super Sad True Love Story,” were new news, and in this venue I was not only slightly older news but also acting misguidedly social in a professional context.

So the eyes have it–they will often tell you more about your own mistakes than signal discourtesy in someone you’re talking to.

Tags:Conversational Sins, Small Talk, Social Networking, The Business of Book Publishing
Filed under: Talky Talk by Daniel Menaker
Monday, August 2nd, 2010 at 8:26 am
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