I am thirty nine years old and I work as a writing tutor at Ivy Tech Community College in Bloomington, Indiana, which is a small institution that shares a town with a much larger one and has, as a consequence, a student body that arrives with a very specific kind of nervousness about its own writing.
The tutoring center is a fluorescent-lit room on the second floor of a converted retail building on the west side of town, next to a Vietnamese pho place whose broth I can smell in the hallway on Thursdays.
I have worked in that room for four years. In that time I have read something like eleven hundred first drafts of essays about a book the student did not entirely finish, and I have learned to hold a conversation about a comma splice with a returning-veteran nursing student who is convinced he cannot write a sentence, in a way that makes him feel like the sentence he wrote is closer to functional than he had believed.
That is, in the roundabout way jobs sometimes do, the whole substance of what I do. I get a person to see one specific thing about their own paragraph that they did not see before, and the person leaves the room a little less afraid of the paragraph than they were when they arrived.
What I only started noticing about two years ago is that being extremely good at the tutoring version of a conversation had made me embarrassingly bad at the ordinary version. The tutoring version has a structure. The student brings a draft. I read it. I ask three or four questions I have refined into a small internal script, because the questions do most of the work for me.
What are you actually trying to say in this paragraph. Where does the sentence you wrote start doing that thing. Is there a smaller word for the phrase you used in the third line. The questions do not require me to be particularly clever. They require me to be patient, and to know a small set of moves that a person’s writing usually needs, and to say the moves in an order that lets the person feel like they arrived at the answer without my having handed it to them. That is a specific skill. I am, without any bragging in the statement, good at it. It also, it turns out, has almost nothing in common with the version of a conversation I have when I run into my next door neighbor at the mailbox and he asks how my weekend was.
The way I found out that I had lost the ordinary skill was that on a Saturday in October two years ago, my neighbor asked how my weekend was, and I answered his question with the following complete sentence: it was fine. Then I said nothing else. He waited a beat, which is what a person does when they have offered a normal opener and the other person has not held up their end, and I heard the beat and had absolutely nothing to add to it, and eventually he said something about the leaves and went inside.
I stood at my mailbox for a moment with a piece of junk mail in my hand and had the very unpleasant realization that I had, at some point in the last four years, become the kind of person who does not do that. Not because I did not like my neighbor. I like my neighbor. I could not find the small thread you follow when a conversation is not asking you to do anything in particular.
I had not become a socially anxious person. I have friends. I have a book club that meets in the back room of a bar off Kirkwood every third Wednesday. I go to a Sunday morning writers’ group at a coffee shop near the courthouse square and I hold my own in those rooms without any trouble. The rooms I hold my own in, however, all have the same underlying structure that the tutoring center has, which is that they are conversations with an agenda.
The book club has a book. The writers’ group has pages to workshop. My friends and I have lives we are catching up on. In every room I had grown comfortable in, the conversation had an axis to spin around. What I had lost, without noticing it happen, was the specific muscle for the axis-less conversation. The one where the person at the mailbox asks how your weekend was and there is no book, no draft, no shared history to lean on, just the small ambient trust of two people who share a driveway and might as well fill twenty seconds pleasantly.
The thing I did not want to accept, at first, was that this was a use-it-or-lose-it kind of muscle. I told myself I would just start doing small talk again by force of will. This did not work, in the way telling yourself to be more spontaneous rarely works. I would rehearse an opener in the produce section at the Kroger on 3rd Street and then not say it. I would think of a question to ask a colleague in the tutoring center break room and then let the moment pass. The problem was that the stakes of a real-life small conversation, small as they are on paper, are not zero. If the exchange goes badly the other person is still standing in front of me. If I say something odd the odd thing hangs there and I have to walk to my car with it.
The person who accidentally handed me the practice place was a colleague named Marcus, a semi-retired freelance copywriter who works two shifts a week at the tutoring center and spends most of the third reading paperbacks in the break room. He mentioned in passing, one afternoon in February when I was complaining to him about the Dennis-at-the-mailbox problem in vaguer terms, that he had started using a text-only chat site as a kind of warm-up before his own writing days, the way another person might do the crossword.
He described it as a lower-stakes version of the exact muscle I had been telling him about, which was the muscle for a conversation without a next step waiting on the other side of it. I filed the tip away for about a week the way you file away most things a colleague suggests over the coffee maker, and then, on a Thursday evening when I was avoiding a draft of my own, I actually opened it.
The first person I matched with was a man in Perth who was on his morning walk and wanted to argue about whether the correct way to greet a dog you do not know is with the palm up or the palm down. I did not know I had an opinion on this. I discovered an opinion I did not know I had, defended it for the length of two of my regular cups of tea, lost the argument in a way that did not sting, and closed the tab. I noticed, walking away from my kitchen table with my second cup, that I had just held up my end of an axis-less conversation for eighteen minutes with a person I would never see again. That was the specific muscle I had thought I had lost. Not lost. Out of practice.
I have kept at it in the small deliberate way you keep at a physical therapy exercise once you can feel it is working. There was a retired crossword compiler in Manchester who wanted to explain, at three in the morning her time, why the American convention of allowing the same word to serve as both clue and answer in different puzzles was, in her professional opinion, a small ongoing crime against the form. There was a night shift nurse in Halifax who had just finished a Marilynne Robinson novel she wanted to talk about with somebody who was not going to be there in the break room in five hours.
There was a high school English teacher in Osaka, on his lunch break, who wanted to know whether the distinction between the definite and the indefinite article in English was really as important as his textbook claimed, and I told him honestly that I have been paid to tell students it is for four years and I still do not entirely think so. There was a father in Buenos Aires waiting outside a piano lesson who wanted, for no reason he could articulate, to walk me through the entire plot of a Peruvian novel he had loved as a teenager. None of them knew I was a tutor. Two of them told me things I have not been able to repeat to anyone since, because I have no way of finding them again, and that turned out to be the part of the arrangement I could not have anticipated from Marcus’s description.
Something like Knotchat is built around one-at-a-time text conversations that end when either person closes the tab, which can make it easier to practice a conversation with no agenda than a public social feed usually allows. That structural simplicity is the reason it feels lower pressure than any group thread I belong to, where every casual message can, over time, turn into a small ongoing obligation to a specific person. I use it maybe twice a week, in the evening, for about twenty minutes at a time.
The conversations are usually forgettable in a way I have come to appreciate, and the forgettable-ness is close to the point. I am not trying to make friends inside the tab. I am trying, in a small deliberate way, to keep the muscle of a mailbox conversation from atrophying while I am busy being good at the other kind of conversation for a living.
My neighbor asked me how my weekend was on a Saturday morning about six weeks ago, in front of the same mailboxes. I told him I had helped my mother move an upright piano out of her front room and that we had been unwise about not renting a proper strap and that my back was reminding me about it in a small daily way. He laughed, and told me a story about a sleeper sofa he had once tried to move up a staircase alone, which ended, in some way that involved a broken banister spindle, with a call to his brother-in-law.
We stood there for what turned out to be almost a minute and a half before he said he had to go put a load of laundry in. His name is Dennis. I have known it for three years. I had not once used it in a sentence with him before that morning, and this past Saturday, when the mail truck was running late and we were both waiting on the curb longer than usual, I said good morning to him with his name in it, and he said good morning back with mine.
