In the comments to Howard’s recent post about Penguicon, I am called “charmingly quiet.” This description amuses me. I don’t think of myself as a particularly quiet person. I certainly do not feel shy. Inside my head I am actively participating in the conversation, it is just that most of my thoughts don’t get spoken aloud. I tend not to speak up unless I feel like my thoughts are unique or a viewpoint which is otherwise unrepresented. The larger the group, the less likely this is to be true. In smaller groups I feel a greater responsibility to help keep the conversation alive, and I am more active about finding ideas to add.
On Friday night I spent several delightful hours speaking with fellow writers. At first the group was small, only four of us, and the conversation was shared pretty evenly by us all. As people drifted in to join the group, the conversational dynamic shifted. People like Mary Robinette Kowal, Patrick Rothfuss, and Cherie Priest took center stage as they began regaling the rest of us with amusing anecdotes. I felt a brief desire to be able to do that, to fix the attention of 10 people and tell a story that has everyone laughing uproarously. It is a skill I could learn. I could learn it from Howard. He does it all the time.
Then I remembered the time at a party when I was participating in a smaller conversation at the edge of a large group. I began telling a story which fell into one of those random conversational pauses. Suddenly I discovered that I had the full attention of everyone in the room. It was rather alarming. I was telling a story that was two people funny. I didn’t think it was 10 people funny. The consequences had multiplied if my story fell flat. It didn’t, but neither was it a hilarious success.
The truth is that my conversational strength is not in entertaining large groups. My strength is conversations with small groups of people who are talking about things that really matter to them. On the tail of this realization, I also recognize that this is one of the reasons that it is important for Howard and I to spend some of our time separate at conventions. He shines while regaling stories in large groups where I tend to be charmingly quiet. Sometimes I want exactly that. I love listening to Howard tell stories. It is restful to be a semi-anonymous observer in a conversation. But it is also important for me to have identity and friendships separate from him.
Knowing all this about myself has taught me to watch for the quiet people in conversations. They are not quiet because they lack interesting thoughts. Which is one of the reasons I love smaller conversations. I love listening to people who spend a lot of time observing. I’m also very impressed when I’m around people who have a sense of conversational balance. These people will realize when someone has been quiet and try to draw them into the conversation. I am most impressed by people who can story tell for large groups and then turn around to draw out quiet observers. I was in excellent company at Penguicon, those storytellers I listed above. They did it all.