Stop Me If You've Heard This One...

I ramble.

I don't deny it; it's true. I suffer from an automatic mouth with no muffler. I relate ten-minute anecdotes, I derail conversations with sentences that are more like plots. I play with emphasis, with timing, with facial expressions and pauses. I am told that my interlocutor has heard a story only to go ahead and tell it anyway, or at least quote part of it just to satisfy myself. I will ask if people have heard "this one" even if I know they have, in the hopes that they will forget, and my heart flips over when I make reference to one of my old, tried-and-true verbal narratives only to hear the response "Wait, what?"

I acknowledge these as character flaws, or at the very least, occasionally irritating quirks. But I still do it (this is one of the great mysteries of life--our capacity to do incredibly annoying things with both awareness and verve). The question today is: why?

And the answer is simple: practice.

Think seriously about the stories you've heard. The archetype of the boring guy with the endless, pointless, totally unengaging anecdotes is strong, and it's on every street corner and living room couch. People drone on without pause or reflection. People add detail to their anecdotes that isn't needed, or misplace it such that it destroys the timing. People emphasize the wrong parts, pick the wrong audiences, and generally botch stories. For every truly good story every related to me, I can pick out three that have left me wanting to interrupt someone just for their own sake. I can also count at least twice per good story that I've been silenced via loud interjection or bemused stare. I know that the signal to noise on anecdotes is bad--I hang out with gamers, who are especially terrible about this--but yet I still contribute. And it's because I consider it practice.

I am not a skilled storyteller; my ability to grab a room depends a lot on the page. And I don't like that--I like a good story, I like a speaker who can lead me along, who can paint a picture, who can make me laugh so hard my lips curls back and my sides hurt. A lot of what is involved in telling a story out loud is also involved in telling a story on paper, especially when, like me, one writes by the seat of one's pants. I want to work toward that, even if it's unattainable. And so I talk. I talk and I talk and I listen and I listen and then, three times over, I analyze. I watch for where detail was overused, where it was underused, where a transition was clumsy, where the timing was off; I watch for where a person stumbled over a word and lost the thread, I watch for where a person took too long to remember a crucial point; I watch cadence and tone and the way these affect things, and the difference between a person laughing with the room and a person laughing so the room knows it's time to do so. And I, of course, do all these things for myself, and I analyze how I could do them better--and also, for the purposes of dialog, how my failings are natural and what they might say about me.

I ramble; but in some ways that rambling is valuable to my art. So if I'm conversing with you, and I start telling a story you've heard; or if you take it turn to tell a story and I seem distracted at the conclusion, please don't be offended. And if I start in on something you don't want to hear, something you do remember and didn't find funny the first time--just tell me that we're at dinner/church/a party/tennis, and this isn't the time to practice.