Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

How a writer ought to prepare for a speech

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Yesterday we talked about why writers don't necessarily make good speakers. Nevertheless writers, more frequently than florists or fire fighters, are asked to speak in public. And the more successful the writer, generally, the more he or she is invited to speak—and thus, make an ass of him or herself.

We can't have that.

At the risk of offering something for free something useful (and hard-earned), here are a few tips specifically for writers who would like to stand before people and appear to be at least half as wise and a third as witty as their prose promises:

1. You are not Christopher Hitchens or Fran Lebowitz. Get it through your head.

2. Eight is enough. That's my rule of rehearsal. Eight times through is the right number, whether you'll be reading from a text and want to appear semi-sponteneous, or speaking extemporaneously and want to appear somewhat coherent. These eight rehearsals don't just take time; they take energy. During the first sessions all by yourself, your hands will sweat, and you will gasp for breath.

3. If you think you can't practice an improvised speech, you are incorrect. You simply improvise the rehearsal. Over and over again. Sometimes your second rehearsal goes better than the third. But generally, the thing keeps getting better—until it starts getting gradually worse, at which time you know you have rehearsed it enough. Now, it'll actually be much better when you have real eyeballs to look at instead of your microwave oven.

4. It's okay to read it from a script too. But the message should be this close to explosive, the delivery must be animated and the writing had better be good enough to justify your insistence on sticking to the script. Being read something dull by a dullard—that wasn't fun in any century.

5. Above all, you must believe you are the only person to be delivering this particular message. While most of the above advice is applies to anyone trying for success in public speaking, I believe writers in particular need to be connected, on an almost spiritual basis, with their message. When I have spoken on communication technology, strategy and management, I have sucked. Why? Because I knew that 500 or 1,000 other people could give that talk just as well or better. It's when I've been talking about the purpose of communication, about writing, about how people connect with other people—these are the times my eyes have welled up with tears as I've stood with one foot on my mother's shoulder and one foot on my dad's. Uh, yeah. More like that.

All this sounds like a tremendous, time-consuming pain in the ass, doesn't it? It is a tremendous pain. But no more a pain than writing a long feature story would be for a certified electrician. You are a writer! You are not a speaker! You must work hard to convince your audience otherwise!

Do it anyway. Spend the time. It's the difference between communicating a message that's important to you and memorable to an audience, and communicating another, equally important and memorable message: You are a bumbling, arrogant fool who neither knows him- or herself nor values the hundreds of human hours being wasted listening to your jumbled, empty words.

Writers: We’re natural lunatics, but to be better public speakers, we have to rehearse

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I rely on the Sunday New York Times to bring me up to speed on all the important news I missed during the week, while I was working. And, if I find myself next to a pool as I did last week in Ft. Myers, Fla., I read the annual collection of the Best American Essays to see what great things were written while I was busy trying to write great things myself.

Reading the paperback anthology, I feel like a lucky thief, stealing the best work out of magazines—from the American Scholar to The Wilson Quarterly—that I don't subscribe to. Sometimes, though, I feel like a befuddled goalie, such as when I ran across a short piece titled "When Writers Speak," which appeared last year in a publication I do read—The New York Times book review.

"Like most writers, I seem to be smarter in print than in person," writes Aurthur Krystal.

In fact, I am smarter when I'm writing. I don't claim this merely because there is usually no one around to observe the false starts and groan-inducing sentences that make a mockery of my presumed intelligence, but because when the work is going well, I'm expressing opinions I've never utterd in conversation and that otherwise might never occur to me. Nor am I the first to have this thought, which naturally occurred to me while composing. according to Edgar Allen Poe, writing in Graham's Magazine, "Some Frenchman—possibly Montaigne—says: 'People talk about thinking, but for my part I never think except when I sit down to write.'" I can't find these words in my copy of Montaigne, but I agree with the thought, whoever might have formed it. And it's not because writing helps me to organize my ideas or reveals how I feel about something, but because it actually creates thought, or at least supplies a petri dish for its genesis.

My dad, who enjoyed a small but rabid following among readers of a an automobile magazine he wrote for, did not enjoy the occasional invitations to give speeches to his fans, because he knew, as he dreadingly put it, "I can't give them what they want."

For the entire first decade of my career, I staggered through most of my public-speaking appearances because I considered public speaking an inferior art to writing, and unworthy of a writer's rehearsal time. It only took a couple dozen minor debacles to learn that if I don't rehearse a lot, I make an ass of myself.

I've put hundreds of writers in front of big audiences at communication conferences. I've heard many of them brag in the bar the night before, about having put the presentation together on the airplane. And I've watched them bomb. You know what kinds of writers generally don't make that mistake? Speechwriters, who know better.

People like Mark Twain were lucky enough to have two separate skills—writing, and speaking—that go nicely together. And by "people like Mark Twain," I mean "Garrison Keillor."

As for the rest of us—well, I'll let Arthur Krystal finish my point:

… when the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt told a friend, a Parisian doctor, that he wanted to meet a certifiable lunatic, he was invited to the doctor's home for supper. A few days later, Humboldt found himself placed at the dinner table between the two men. One was polite, somewhat reserved, and didn't go in for small talk. The other, dressed in ill-matched clothes, chattered away on every subject under the sun, gesticulating wildly, while making horrible faces. When the meal was over, Humboldt turned to his host. "I like your lunatic," he whispered, indicating the talkative man. The host frowned. "But it's the other one who's the lunatic. The man you're pointing to is Monsieur Honoré de Balzac."

Tomorrow, I'll share here what I learned about how a writer ought to prepare for a speaking engagement. Meanwhile, dear writer: Can you spiel thyself?

A writer is an inventor; a headline writer is a salesman

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Copyblogger just came out with a good primer on headline writing, its importance underlined by a statistic that says eight out of 10 people will read a headline, but only two out of 10 will read the story.

That must be the stat on bad headlines.

A good headline is almost irresistible. Once I was an editorial director, and one of my writers asked me how it was that I wrote such good headlines.

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe because my dad was an advertisting guy."

"Oh no," she groaned. "My dad is a lawyer."

Most writers are bad at writing headlines for their own pieces for the same reason that inventors are bad at selling their own inventions. They think the thing will sell itself, and they forget that people have gotten along perfectly well without it for thousands of years, and would be happy to do so for thousands more.

Same with goes for the article you just worked on for a month.

So what? says the reader.

Here's what, Dummy, must say the headline.

At the risk of actually teaching something on my blog—one doesn't want to be a union scab—here's a suggestion

If you have to write headlines for your own stories, do this: Scan your world for the one Philistine you know who is incurious enough to be utterly uninterested in the subject.

Write a headline to convince her to read your piece.

That way, you might—might—be able to summon the salesman's heart sufficiently to sell your story.