Do You Confess?

When I was at the Speechwriter's Conference in Washington DC last year (a highly recommended event by the way – set for February 2006) I was struck by how many speechwriters were able to proclaim loudly and proudly that they were “so-and-so’s” speechwriter. Well not quite so ostentatiously as that perhaps. That might not have been their title on the org chart. But if they were called something else – it was clear that was their function.

Some of the University types had to concede that the speechwriting job was cloaked under other titles like “Executive Assistant”. Not out of any embarrassment that they used speechwriters to help them with their remarks, but rather more for internal political reasons. “What do you mean you spend scarce university dollars on the services of a speechwriter?”- that sort of thing.

Freelancers run into a similar problem. I can’t count the number of times I have been told in slightly hushed tones that when I interview internal staff for research purposes I shouldn't actually say that I was working on the boss’ speech. This is passing strange of course. If I was working on the annual report – or a quarterly report to stockholders – or a Memorandum to Cabinet for that matter – all for the signature for the person in charge – no one would bat an eyelash. But say you are writing their speech and you get the “you mean he doesn’t write his own?” look.

I find this to be the case most especially in the public sector. Private Sector clients seem to have no such hang-ups. Paradoxically perhaps, those who are most articulate, the most engaging on the stage - the ones who don't really need a speechwriter - are the ones most likely to use one. And why wouldn’t they? Speech writing is very labour intensive and their hourly rate is far higher than they would ever have to pay even the priciest of contract writers. So in most cases it makes no sense for them to write their own from scratch.

So we freelancers tend to be the "elephant in the room". Our clients love us, but they don't necessarily want to acknowledge our existence. That gives us a major marketing headache. Although I can say I have written speeches for a particular government agency or a corporate client – in most instances I am constrained from identifying my speakers by name or event. It is an unwritten rule that you don’t “out” your clients. At least it is my unwritten rule.

So how to you sell your services if you can’t share with prospective clients specific speeches you have written or worked on? Well there is good news on two fronts.

First, you can simply ask for permission of an existing client. Notwithstanding my comments above, some are happy for you to do so. One client – private sector of course – urged me to share because he felt it gave his speeches a second life after they were first given.

The other piece of good news is that – except for jobs I am bidding on – I am very rarely asked to produce speech writing samples to prove my bona fides. Potential customers just aren’t interested and they don’t have time to read speeches you have written for others. They have likely checked out your credentials from other sources and you seal the deal (here comes Colin's standard harangue) by letting them know you will make their project your passion for the life of the speech assignment. And of course, get the first one under your belt, and you become the CEO’s path of least resistance for speech work. Why would he/she go anywhere else if they liked what you did for them last time? As a result speechwriters tend to have their clients for the long haul. You tend to lose them only if they die - in the corporate sense - and sometimes in the literal sense!

If there are any freelancers out there who have a different take on marketing their services, I would be glad to hear about it.

Comments?

Last Speech Writing Workshop For 2005 Set for September 25, 2005

Last Speech Writing workshop for the year set for September 25, 2005.

Here are a few comments from participants in the May workshop.

"Thank you once again for your superb workshop.....for reawakening me to my love of story and to the powerful magic of words.

........Daphne Sams



"...it was a more non-linear approach than I expected. That was nice in a way because your assumption seemed to be that we were all smart and could already do research and spin words and that what we needed from you was the insight to make our speeches resonate....a good speech can be inspiring. So can a good course, and yours was. Thank you.

........Margaret Shaw



"....Thoroughly enjoyed it!"

..........Paul MacDonald



"..... I returned home from the workshop....convinced that speech writing is indeed the field for me to pursue and the work most likely to last me into my old age."

........John Hurst



....your emphasis on story and narrative really encouraged me to pursue speech writing to a greater degree. I'm really looking forward to my first chance to take this new found perspective and apply it to writing an engaging speech.

.........Jeff Dewsbury



You can get complete information about the course by going here

Discounted price for early sign-up.

Feelings

This Spring I was approached by a corporate executive to assist him in preparing a convocation speech he was to give to a private boys school. He sat on the Board of Directors – his son was an alumnus – and so he was committed to doing a first rate job.
He was a great client to work with. He knew the messages he wanted to deliver and he had some stories to tell. Would that all my clients would make it so easy going in. We worked on some humour – coming out of story of course – and we were very aware that an audience of 18 year olds wasn’t likely to be hanging on his every word. Still the messages of "dreaming big dreams while enjoying the moment" – "giving back" – "acting with integrity" - were all things he felt important to articulate – to the boys in the presence of their parents.

We put the thing together fairly quickly and we were happy with the product. He promised to give me a post-mortem report.

When he did, he told me of a little joke he added at the front end that was inspired by a chat he had had with his son a few days before the speech. At one point in their conversation he said “Dad, relax, the only person who is going to care about what you talk about is “you”. No one else will be paying much attention”.

He led with that little story and of course it got a commensurate laugh and sympathy from the parents who were all too aware of their sons’ short attention spans.

And of course my client’s son was right. The audience had expectations there would be a speech – because it was a convocation after all – but they probably didn’t much care what he said. Although I dare say they hoped it wouldn’t bore them to tears.

His comment also got me to thinking about this scary question. Do most audiences care what their speakers say?

My quick answer is “no.” They really want to have the speaker make them feel better.

If the occasion is commemorative – such as at a funeral at the passing of a great person or a close friend– they want the speaker to confirm the depth of their loss. They want someone to affirm the bond only shared grief among strangers can bring.

If they are angry stockholders they want acknowledgement of the legitimacy of their anger and they want to feel better by hearing the CEO announce a two for one stock split at the AGM.

It they go to listen to a politician – they want to be reassured that someone smarter than them is driving the train.

If they are fearful – think 21st century terrorism – they want to feel made to feel safer.

So yes all the usual rules about speech writing apply. Be clear about your client’s message. Write in a language that is easy on the ear. Tell a story or two. Remember too that the primary purpose of most speeches is not to deliver information but rather establish a level of engagement between the speaker and the audience and in the process have them buy into the messages.

But then think about how your audience might feel about the sum and substance of your words. Try to imagine how you would feel if you were in the audience. And what would make you feel better if you had to sit through one of your speeches.

Confessions of a Freelance Speechwriter

I remember the day I told my professional colleagues that I was quitting my job in government communications. They emailed me back saying how brave I was-which I took as a codeword for how stupid I was. Here I was quitting my good paying, fully pensioned, health-cared job to make money as a flak for hire. I could visualize them rolling their eyes, thinking I had taken leave of my senses. How could I choose the most boring form of writing, I could hear them muttering, reflecting I suppose on all the boring speeches they had heard or written.

I took the other view. I hated all the other stuff. The endless meetings. The bureaucratic rules. Everything that actually got in the way of doing your job. I had written and/or vetted a ton of speeches on the job, so I knew I had the skill set. I had also come across a statistic that said that in the U.S. alone more than 100,000 speeches were given every 24 hours. I also knew that most speakers didn't write their own. Hmm. There might be a market here. And my timing was great because in 1993/4 e-mail was just beginning to become commonplace. That meant I could deliver speeches to potentially any client anywhere rather than being restricted to my home city.

So I flung caution to the winds and dove off the deep end. And never regretted it for a moment.

But before you chuck your good paying, fully pensioned, heath-cared job-let me give you a checklist of the pros and cons of the freelance life.

On the plus side, being a freelance speechwriter can be endlessly fascinating because you never know what you are going to be asked to write about. It could be on anything and everything. Social policy. Health or environmental initiatives. Labor relations and worker compensation. Banking. Corporate social responsibility. International affairs. Finance. Or any other topic under the sun.

The second plus is that we sometimes get to rub shoulders with the rich and semi-famous. With people who perhaps in other circumstances are out of our league. I mean no self-deprecation by this. It's just that under normal circumstances I don't get to hang out with multi-millionaires, or captains of industry, or senior members of government. But when they turn their attention to the words that will come out of their mouths-they want to talk to their speechwriters. And they want to talk to them now! So, we are brought into their professional circle for a short time-a momentary vicarious thrill if you will.

What else? We don't often get roped into office politics or useless meetings. Our clients really like us because we are saving them their most precious of commodity-time. And, oh yes, the pay is pretty good.

But the most satisfying part of freelancing for me is this. As speechwriters we may not make policy, but we sure get to "nuance" it. The first time you hear your words on a 15-second sound bite on the evening news-you suddenly realize that you sometimes get to articulate the first expression of a new policy or service. And if you do a really good job, you might find that articulation becomes an oft- repeated mantra within your client's organization.

The downside: We work like dogs. Because we have clients across time zones we get phone calls at very strange hours. We have to be prepared to work on "emergency" speeches which can mean many lost weekends and late nights. We need to have very understanding families.

The consequences of error are huge. Nobody is going to be doing detailed fact checking of our research. Embarrass clients just once by putting incorrect facts or clumsy syntax in their mouths, and we won't hear from them again. Not ever. Quite right too.

The joy of sharing their passions notwithstanding- once you have agreed to a speech assignment you are pretty much on your own. All communications directors want to know is if you can do the job. If the answer is "yes" they are on to other things. There won't be a lot of hand holding.

Like a news reporter you will have to do a lot of mining for sum and substance-and do it all with a certain finesse so you don't upset any political apple carts. You have to be able to absorb huge amounts of new information, all the while understanding you won't be using 98 percent of it. But you have to inhale the useless stuff so you can exhale the truly useful.

You have to have very finely tuned political antenna. You may be writing a speech for the CEO, but you aren't a senior member of his or her staff. Heck, your clients might not even want to let their people know that they are using freelancers. So you can't go blundering around like a wounded walrus when you go digging for information.

Did I say the pay is pretty good? Well it is. But not nearly what it should be. And as for that rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous, for every speech that happens with, you will have 20 others where you never meet the client, many of whom are thousands of miles away.

Your brains can get fried and sometimes you wonder when burnout will come. Or if you can ever have another original thought for a long-term client.

Perhaps I have depressed you right out of quitting your day job. Perhaps that's a good thing. If you want to be a prophet honored in your own time, don't be a freelance speechwriter.

You will be confined to relative anonymity. The best you can hope for is a good reputation in the communications community and perhaps "he wrote good rah-rah" as your epitaph. But it is such fun"rah- rah".

If I had my life as a do-over, I would be a Hollywood script writer writing dialogue. Since I am way too old for that demographic, at least I get to work in the shadows writing monologue. I get to put words in other people's mouths. I get paid to do it. And I never know what the next phone call will bring.

Pretty cool.

Openings & Adrenaline

"They shoot the white girl first" has been recognized by many as one of the great opening lines in late 20th century llterature. It comes from Toni Morrison's grand novel "Paradise." I defy anyone to read that line - and not want to find out how the next paragraphs and pages play out.
As speechwriters we always have to concern iourselves with finding great openings for our clients' events. We want to give them words that will give their audiences reassurance that they aren't just about to waste the next twenty minutes of their lives. Rather, they settle down and wait expectantly for the what your speaker is going to say next.

So where or how do we find great openings? Well you could do worse than looking to great literature as a guide.

Of course, the best openings from our own imaginations - or that of our clients.

Second best come from stories - found, made up, or from real life. People love stories and they are what you should always be trying to cajole out of your clients. Even if you simply started with a speech with the line "I want to tell you a story", you have an automatic buy-in from the audience to pay attention to what comes next.

The minute a client gets my commitment to write a speech - the brain cellss start to twitch as I immediately begin to think of possible openings for the speech - even before I know a thing about message or motive.

No matter how much or how little I know about the topic - I begin to think of exactly that. How much do I know about the topic? It helps if you are a news junkie because if you are - you automatically become at least marginally well-informed about almost any topic under the sun. I do mean marginally, but at least it's a starting point.

Newspapers can give you opening lines. Interesting facts. Anecdotes. News about the competition. News about an industry. About government policy. Public mood. The economy. Science. Lilfe. The stuff of life is in the news. Soak it up like a sponge.

And of course the Internet and Google have become our new best friends for triggering ideas that help us come up with openings that have staying power.

By the way, you want to know the line following "They shoot the white girl first.?" It's

"With the rest they can take their time."

Makes you want to go right out and get the book, doesn't it?



Adrenaline Junkies ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I have come to the conclusion that most freelance writers - and perhaps especially freelance speech writers most of all - are adrenaline junkies. We love the chase of getting work, of having gotten work done, and yes even doing the work.
And we whine and moan about the stress of too many clients and too many competing deadlines.

But just let that phone stop ringing for more than a week or two and we go through a type of withdrawal. Instead of luxuriating in our downtime, we have this nagging sense of unease. It's not usually a worry about money, or that our clients are going to disappear - that's the natural anxiety of all freelancers.

Rather - it's an unifferentiated sense of angst - brought on by actually missing those deadlines we love to curse and complain about. Those deadlines may exhaust us but they energize us as well.

We get hooked on this quite strange ying and yang of a process we love and hate at the same time. Sort of like a drug. Or adrenaline. We miss it when it's gone.

To Outline or Not Outline? That is the Question of the Day

I believe that corporate writing can be just as creative as any other form of what is labeled creative non-fiction. Nowhere more so than in the writing speeches.
I find writing an outline to a speech is very counter-intuitive to the creative process.

The act of speech writing should be fluid and organic. It is not a paint-by-numbers fill-in-the blanks game.

Now not for a minute am I suggesting that speeches shouldn't have some structure. Wandering all over the map in an aimless search for a point is a disaster. Some politicians - Bill Clinton comes to mind - can pull it off because they have a style of delivery - a stage persona if you will - that allows them to give free-form speeches.

But most of our clients are not natural performers on stage. They need to lean on the words you give them. So yes - I think speeches should have a beginning,middle and end - and some logic. You don't want audiences leaving, scratching their heads asking themselves if they have just needlessly sacrificed 20 minutes of their lives.

It is just that outlines never get me where I want to go. Although of course I have the key messages pinned up on my computer monitor to make sure I stay in the agreed upon ball park.

That said - I know some of my colleagues disagree with me on this point.

So what do you do? Do you write outlines first? Are you forced into the outlines provided by your clients? Or do you find outlines a help in your creative process?

I would love to hear your comments. Just click here. Just think. You need an excuse to procrastinate and I have just given you one.

Whose Voice Is It Anyway?

Of all the questions I am asked about freelance speech writing, the first is how do I write in the voice of so many different clients?
Well, actually it's really the third question I get. The first two things the curious ask are: "How much do you get paid?" Usually followed by "did you write that piece of crap by [and here they fill in the name of the politician they hate the most]? But I digress....

The short answer to the question of how I write in other people's voices is I don't even try. I don't mean it to be flippant, but to a large extent it is true.

First - I have clients across Canada and into the US. Many I will never meet. Some I will never get to talk to. There are still others who don't even know that I am their speech writer for a particular event - I am hired by a Director of Communications who I will talk to on the phone.

So to a large extent I am a nameless faceless wordsmith working in total anonymity giving real meaning to the term "backroom boy."

But such is life if you want to make a living as a freelance speechwriter.

All that said, I wonder if we can ever find the "authentic" voice of our clients. We scarcely know our own. I really write in my own voice. In a language that I hope is simple - with a text that most anyone can deliver. With sentences that are declarative and varied in length - but never overly long or in the passive voice.

It's not that long complex sentences can never be used - it is just that few speakers can deliver them.

Above all I try to write in a style that is engaging - with text full of stories that speak to the human condition.

I do tape record all the interviews I do get. For two reasons. The first is that I might be running six projects concurrently, and may not get back to any one speech until weeks after the initial and only interview. I don't transcribe the tapes but I do listen to them to a least to refresh my memory on his/her natural sound. And usually there is a story or two on the tape. Those I do transcribe word for word because stories "as told by" gets you closest to your client's voice because they tend to tell them unedited by "corporate speak."

What do you think? How do you capture the voices of your clients?

If My Clients Weren't Already Perfect....

If my clients weren't already perfect, I would offer them the following 15 pieces of advice to make our experience just that much better.

1. Call me in early on in the process. In fact, I am the first person you should call once you decide to commit to a speech engagement.

2. Know why you or your speaker has taken on this commitment. And I don't just mean because he/she was invited, or always does this once a year. I will want to dig down for better motivation than this.

3. Get me access to your speaker. This is not a deal breaker but common sense says that speaker and speech writer should get to know each other. There is an exception to this rule. If clients haven't given the speech much thought - as is often the case - and aren't yet prepared to do so - it may be better to give them something - a draft - to react against and go from there.

4. I will do a lot of research on my own, but it would help me immensely if you point me in the right direction if that direction isn't obvious at first blush.

5. Conversely, don't bury me in totally unfiltered material.

6. Be honest with me about how comfortable you (or your speakers) are on the public stage.

7. Be warned, I am going to ask for stories. I don't care what the occasion or venue is. All speeches are made better if they are couched in stories of our common human condition.

8. Don't get me involved in office politics but warn me if they are in play. And if it is a secret you are hiring me, let me know so I can position my inquiries for information accordingly.

9. This one is the deal breaker. Know the message (read singular) you want to deliver. I am happy to walk you through the process - we can work on messaging together. But we have to agree on what the messaging is or it will all end in tears. Hint: Understand there are internal needs and audience needs. I always want to concern myself with the latter; you can take care of the former.

10. I will try to talk you out of Power Point. It is rare to see a good speaker's speech made better with Power Point but often the case that a poor speaker will be worse off with slides. If we do go there, let's make sure we do the speech first, the PP slides second.

11. Don't call me in to a lot of staff meetings. While these can be very useful for the in-house speech writer who needs to be aware of ongoing political and policy shifts over time - as a freelancer I have to be much more single-minded. That said, it is often more useful for me to meet your front line people than your staff or policy people. I want to know what your customers/constituents are thinking.

12. Point 1 notwithstanding you can call me in at the last minute. If you are a steady client, you should have an expectation that I will be available for "emergency" speeches. I never said I wanted a balanced life.



13. Recognize that if you tinker with the phrasing of one sentence you are going to change the rhythm and balance of the sentences preceding and following. So if you are going to tinker - tinker out loud.
14. Don't circulate an outline for comment by every department head. We will just end up with a kitchen sink. Better still, don't even write an outline for me. They are not conducive to good speech writing.

15. You shouldn't have to hold my hand. Tell me what you want done, a few stories, and the message. And I will toddle off, stay out of your hair and deliver a product on time and on budget. And if we have worked well together, there should be minimal re-writing of the first draft.

And that's just for starters!

For a full thrashing out of some of these and other points, if you are at loose ends this weekend and live in Vancouver, I am holding an all day workshop on Saturday, May 21, 2005. More info in the next item down.



Speech Writing Workshop In Vancouver, BC Set for May 21, 2005.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Want to learn more about the art and craft of speech writing?
The speech writing workshop I mentioned in my last newsletter is now set for all day Saturday, May 21, 2005 in downtown Vancouver.

This is not a writing class per se, but will cover the issues you must concern yourself with when a client calls you and says "We Need A Speech." This one day workshop will get you to the point where you can feel confident that you can say "yes" to such a request.

The course is beginning to fill up. If you are interested drop me a line here and I will send you course details, price and registration information.