Introduction

Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory. He who enjoys it wields a power more durable than that of a great king. He is an independent force in the world. Abandoned by his party, betrayed by his friends, stripped of his offices, whoever can command this power is still formidable.

—WINSTON CHURCHILL

What he said, but the less chauvinistic version.

—VICTORIA WELLMAN

One of my favorite clients, Sherri, an astronaut whose account of going to space makes me cry like a baby every time, once told me that GPS coordinates were one of the few things the world can agree on. I’d say there’s another thing: the universal desire not to completely suck when we speak in public.

Feelings range from the kind of deep-seated, clinically diagnosed social anxiety that makes the prospect of standing in front of a roomful of people equivalent to being waterboarded, at one end of the spectrum, to the other end, where exhibitionists actively seek out the spotlight and fantasize about a standing ovation. And then there are the people in between who don’t particularly relish the opportunity but would probably choose it over, say, being stung by a bee, because they recognize that getting better at public speaking, while potentially just as uncomfortable, has an outsized payoff.

Whatever negative feelings the prospect of speaking may trigger, you pretty much have two options. One is to try to remedy the fear by addressing the psychological drivers. For this you might consult a coach. Or a pharmacist. The other is to improve the content so that when you step up to the podium or the microphone and the heart palpitations begin to subside, you have something fucking great to say.

Though I usually warn people against starting a speech with the apologetic disclaimer “I’m a bit nervous,” I do recall granting this wish to one client, but not because she was making excuses.

I’m sure that I’m not the first parent to say this here, but it’s really hard to describe how I feel today. Perhaps I can explain it like this: I took a public speaking class back in college, and I dropped out because every time it was my turn to speak, I thought I was gonna die. Right now I feel completely the opposite—my heart isn’t failing, it’s exploding. I look around the room and all I see are faces of people who know and love my daughter and who have in some way helped her get here today. If I could hand out a stone for all those I need to thank, I’d have to hire a forklift to carry them. And the nearest rental company is seventy-six miles away—I checked it out.

Rebecca was speaking at her daughter’s graduation from an equine therapy treatment center. After Izzy turned semipro at snowboarding at a very young age, she had fallen in with a bad crowd and started getting in trouble with the police a lot. Coming to terms with the fact that Izzy had a Xanax addiction and was heading down a slippery slope—the kind that couldn’t be navigated by a snowboard—Rebecca did what any parent would try to avoid at all costs: she “gooned” her daughter. This, I learned from Rebecca, means that at 4:00 a.m. one night, a guy from a rehab center came to the house and took Izzy away to a wilderness camp for ninety days. Amazingly, after the ninety days, Izzy acknowledged she was in a better emotional space and agreed to attend a ranch school where tending to horses provided a framework of accountability, compassion, and other such values that parents struggle to instill in their children. By the time Izzy reached her graduation ceremony, Rebecca was positively champing at the bit to get up onstage and tell her daughter how proud of her she was—and, as was the custom, dedicate a stone to each person she wanted to thank. (I researched the rental companies in the area; the seventy-six miles was no joke.) Rebecca had come to the realization that when you’re invested in your message and you see the crowd as allies, not enemies, there is much to relish about sharing that message.

The problem, as poor Izzy can vouch, is that buying Xanax is a lot easier. Just ask Izzy. From writing to delivery, the process of crafting a brilliant speech for most people promises only a grueling, often unsatisfying, frustrating, and unknowable gauntlet of questions:

Where do I begin?

How do I put the thoughts together?

How do I make sure I say what they want?

How do I make it funny?

Where do I stand? How do I stand? Should I stand?

Then the panic becomes more specific …

Oprah is speaking right before me.

Most of the audience are comedy writers and I’m an accountant.

I’ve had a genius idea, but it’s hard to articulate quantum physics.

If I say the wrong thing, I could spark an international disaster.

Something incredible happened to me, but words don’t do it justice.

I used to sleep with the groom.

You may be one of the millions who have panic-scoured the internet. How to write a great speech, you desperately typed into Google’s search bar, only to come across hackneyed tips written by junior editors at lifestyle magazines. You might have gone to YouTube, where at the very best you might have found a video of a gentle-mannered Chris Anderson in a pair of crisply ironed chinos calmly outlining the TED method, which, despite the charming soundtrack of trills and sprightly dings, and some lovely graphics, only made you more intimidated by the idea that your one amazing “idea” maybe isn’t amazing enough. Or maybe you’ll have taken your problem to the bookstore, where you found emotionally devoid corporate manuals written by communications experts and fans of Woodrow Wilson.

The problem isn’t that all the experts are crap. I don’t have that much hubris. It’s that there aren’t that many actual experts, let alone any who, without knowing a thing about you, can provide the kind of specific advice you need. To this day I’ve never even met another speechwriter, either at a social gathering or a networking schmooze. It’s sort of the occupational equivalent of being born a leap-year baby, on February 29 (as I was—and yet I know four other people with the same birthday). Filmmakers, bankers, swimming instructors, tree doctors, pageant queens, and hackers—from the most obvious to the most niche, I’ve encountered professionals from every facet of the workforce. I even came across an ex-Mossad locksmith once. I’ve met authors, copywriters, journalists, feature writers, scriptwriters. Every kind of writer you can imagine—I mean, I live in Brooklyn; everyone in my neighborhood is a writer. But none of them are speechwriters.

Unsurprisingly, when people find out how I make a living, the interrogation begins. The first thing they want to know is whose speeches I’ve written, hoping I’ll spill the beans on a famous politician or celebrity. This makes sense if we’re to believe Yuval Noah Harari’s theory that Homo sapiens conquered the world in large part because of their proclivity for gossip. They clearly didn’t have NDAs and discretionary policies back then.

I can’t blame them. It’s entirely fair to presume that only the wealthy and influential have speechwriters. But this exclusivity is precisely why I started my company, The Oratory Laboratory.

I won’t be coy: I’m not cheap. Thomas Edison said genius was 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent sweat. Well, so is speechwriting—there are no shortcuts—and we all know the adage about time and money. The Oratory Laboratory, however, was built on a more ideological and egalitarian belief (I am, after all, a Brit), that everyone deserves a speechwriter and almost as many people need one. It was a way to acknowledge that most people, regardless of class, race, political affiliation, wealth, age, sex, gender, blood group, or zip code, have at one time (or maybe even four) been invited or been given the opportunity to speak about something in a room full of people and that almost as many do a crummy job of it. It didn’t seem fair to the speakers or their agonized audiences to ignore their plight.

It used to be presumed that speaking in public required confidence and charisma and was a skill exercised only by the elite and well-educated few—lawyers, politicians, corporate bigwigs, and others in positions of power and privilege—while the mostly disenfranchised masses just watched.

But all that has changed. The technology revolution has raised the stakes for everyone.

Today on YouTube, 9 million viewers can mock the “worst best-man speech ever”—and the same 9 million can model their vision for the future on the viral video of a commencement speech delivered by an era-defining thought leader.

Now we have tweets and blogs and Instagram feeds that amplify our own political manifestos, personal soliloquies, and professional aspirations—with zero filter and every expectation that there is an audience who is listening and cares.

We have TED, The Moth, and StoryCorps. And we have conferences, retreats, and blockbuster events like SXSW that have multiplied the number of people with access to the once-exclusive spotlight by an increasingly immeasurable number.

Nowadays, an ability to express yourself in public, thoughtfully and without fear, in an authentic voice, has become both a rite of passage and an essential skill for anyone who wants to make a difference, however modest or grand—whether in their family, in the community, in the workplace, or at the podium in front of thousands. What better way to expand your networks, garner respect, and rise up the totem pole (social or professional) than by successfully captivating an audience with your ideas? And yet the conventional wisdom around what resonates for today’s speakers and their audiences has failed to evolve, so speakers are left to wonder how they will craft a speech that provides the individuality, originality, and authenticity our culture demands.

As advertisers and marketers continue to draw on human experiences and authenticity to raise brand awareness and attract clicks, the most human way to connect to an audience has been left behind in terms of innovation. A powerful speech is unlike any other form of communication. It wins elections, creates movements, inspires our peers, and brings people together. It deserves a new way of thinking.

* * *

In the early fall of 2008, my then-boyfriend, Nathan, and I found ourselves in a minivan on I-95 bouncing our way south back to New York City from a wedding in New Hampshire. At the time nothing in our profiles indicated we had a future together. He was a comedy and improv nerd from a deteriorating industrial town in Massachusetts. His family was complicated—he had way more parents and stepfamily than I did. He wore square-toed dress shoes, loved Blue Man Group, and talked about his friends using weird names they’d given each other during experimental workshops. In contrast, I grew up in a snobby central London neighborhood in an unhinged but committed family who, until quite recently, generally procreated in twos. I hated square-toed shoes and Blue Man Group, and aside from a tight-knit group of girlfriends, the kinds of people I knew in New York had names that were memorable only when you needed to get into an exclusive bar. Nathan was a tonic to that world, the kind that didn’t need vodka. He reacquainted me with my more authentic self—the one who could quote John Hughes movies from start to end and had been happiest dancing around in leg warmers at drama school. We started dating in April, but by midsummer we’d passed an important relationship benchmark by making out to Purple Rain—the entire movie, not just the song. It was intense. By early fall, we had passed the ultimate relationship stress test by attending three summer weddings as each other’s official date.

On our drive home from the last, the conversation turned to the subject of the wedding speeches and how embarrassingly bad they’d been. I recalled the pained expressions, bemused glances, and awkward silences that had torpedoed the otherwise pleasurable crescendo of eye-catching décor, delicious food, and potent signature cocktails. At each of these weddings the ill-conceived and poorly executed speeches had hijacked the moment—transforming the room from vibrant and boisterous to quiet, uncomfortable, and dull.

At the first wedding, the maid of honor had talked exclusively about herself. She told every story that should have been about the bride as if she were the protagonist in her best friend’s life story. “She always got so pissed when I … She hated it when I … It was so funny when our friend Jenna and I…” It was so self-absorbed and self-flattering that she ended up just sounding bitchy. In the second wedding, the best man delivered an A-to-Z character breakdown of the groom. It was so long and so boring the guests had nothing to do but refill their glasses. By the letter D we were drunk. By W we were wasted. The third and final wedding featured a speech from the father of the bride that amounted to a chronological retelling of his daughter’s life, from her first stuffed animal she couldn’t live without and the high school sports teams and trophies to the wonderful internship she’d won and the sought-after job she now had. By the time we got to her college days, I’d already fashioned about nineteen original origami sculptures from my napkin, which is hard to do with slippery polyester.

At that moment in the minivan I realized that no one should ever have to sit in silence and be subjected to an hour of generic, clichéd, sentimental drivel again, nor should anyone ever have to experience the guilt of committing such a crime. “Someone needs to help these people!” I blurted out. “Someone must save the world from bad speeches!”

* * *

Now, I didn’t go to Georgetown and study political science or intern on a political campaign. I never wrote speeches for my boss. In fact, while my sister devoured books (quite literally—she tore off and chewed the corners of the pages), I barely even read as a child. When George H. W. Bush was delivering Peggy Noonan’s famous “Read my lips—no new taxes” line, I was in middle school and busy polishing a series of speeches of my own that reflected on the most crucial topics of the day, including great white sharks, snowboarding, and, most fittingly, the history of Alcoholics Anonymous. Yet despite my enjoyment of this type of assignment, I didn’t take writing seriously as an adult until I enrolled at drama school in London and realized that Shakespeare really was as good as everyone insisted. Shortly after graduating and moving to New York to pursue the American dream of waiting in line at Equity auditions, I found there was plenty of time between line runs to ruminate on all my brilliant ideas for TV shows and memoirs. I don’t know how many writers can put a date on the day they began to write, but I honestly can. It was January 14, 2008. I wrote a cocky letter to a former opinion writer and satirical genius at The Times in London in response to an article about English expats in New York. And I’ll never forget my sister’s response when I sent her a copy, feeling very pleased with my debut effort. She wrote back: “That’s brilliant! Maybe you should be a journalist! You could have a column about the ‘Englishwoman in New York.’ You’ve got a real talent. Xxxxx.” That was all I needed—an endorsement from my closest ally. I wrote essays about being an English girl in New York, a pilot episode about being an English girl in New York, and a one-woman stage show about being an English girl in New York. The casting directors of Law and Order weren’t quite as interested in a spontaneous recital of my own work as I’d hoped, but the well-established and influential writers at the arts club where I worked were more generous with their time and attention and were even encouraging with their feedback. To hell with all those casting directors who didn’t want me in their movies and the waiting rooms full of girls who looked like me with better hair and makeup. Dick Wolf could s*** it.

While continuing to polish my autobiographical magnum opera, I built up my resume as a feature writer, reporter, copywriter, producer, and voice-over artist, contributing articles and scripts to newsrooms and networks, and by the time the lightbulb went off in that minivan on I-95 I had zero experience speechwriting beyond a couple of wedding hits, but I knew I possessed every tool the job required. That day Nathan and I committed to the challenge of saving the world from bad speeches. And then, just like Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski—whose Morning Joe promo I scripted years before they went public as a couple, only to be told that the way it highlighted their chemistry was too suggestive—Nathan and I committed to each other. Joe and Mika were right: it made things much easier. (I still have a cut of the promo, by the way.)

* * *

Ten years later, I’ve crafted more than five hundred speeches for almost as many people, and I can quite honestly say I’ve had just as much if not more fun writing their stories. The most rewarding collaborations and exciting alliances have not been with celebrities who are tirelessly corralled and controlled by publicists or managers and seldom digress from talking points that have been nipped and tucked in “personal branding” sessions. The best experiences have been with the hundreds of other speakers—the counterterrorism cyber experts, creators of TV shows, art buyers, Supreme Court justices, and regular people—who, in simply trying to articulate how they feel about people they love and issues they care about, not only take me on a path of incredible learning but discover for themselves the import of their stories and what it is to feel heard. If there is one thing that I cannot get enough of, it is hearing how transformed the speaker has been by the process of reaching deep within in order to externalize the feelings they might not have shared, the hunches they’ve been too nervous to voice, the ideas that without oxygen hadn’t yet crystallized.

I don’t know if I’ve written as many speeches as Cody Keenan or Jon Favreau (both of whom wrote speeches for Barack Obama), but I am certain that I’ve written for many more people. So sure in fact that a few years ago I tasked an intern with researching the Guinness Book of World Records application process. I’ve always thought that would be such a great line to tout: “world record holding speechwriter!” Shame the paperwork was too much of a bore. Having written for so many people, however, I’ve been forced to scrutinize, iterate on, and codify a process that is flexible enough to work with each and every one of those people and on each and every speech. It’s a creative strategy that respects the fact that every person and every speech is unique, and therefore every structure, every subtext, every joke, every setup, and every conclusion must be unique too. That a protest speech does not consist of the same elements as a commencement address. That a rally speech isn’t a client presentation, an award speech isn’t a fundraiser, and a keynote isn’t a company roast. It’s not about the specific building blocks (or Lego pieces, if you will); rather, it’s about gathering the best raw materials and imagining a speech so original that only you could have written it.

* * *

“How do you do it, then?” is the next thing people want to know when I’m done with the impassioned manifesto. Interested and skeptical parties alike can’t quite fathom how this process would maintain integrity and authenticity. How do I capture a speaker’s personality and their ideas? And the answer I give them is that I too ask questions. Lots of questions. Silly questions, inappropriate questions, irrelevant questions, disturbing questions, provocative questions, and searching questions.

By invitation, I put on the speaker’s shoes and walk around in their world, exploring their perspectives and their ideas as best I can. And then I put my shoes back on to interrogate those ideas and perspectives, recast them, and articulate them in a way that captures the imagination of the people listening. I ask myself questions about what I don’t know I don’t know. I ask myself questions I think the audience would want to know. I go down internet rabbit holes, unearth question marks around every corner, interrogate everything I hear and read in the media that might pertain to the speech, and wrestle with structures and frameworks and central themes. I ask questions right up until the last period on the first draft, knowing that if I start from a place of ignorance and am willing to put in the work, this curiosity, open-mindedness, and fearlessness will take me where I need to go. It is a grueling but blissful process.

As a speaker, your own shoes are familiar and comfortable. You know your subject. You know your experience. You’re close to it. But wearing your own shoes will always limit how far you can go in writing a speech, and—like a worn-in, worn-down pair of slippers—may even cause you to stumble. As you begin to think about how to package and share your thoughts and ideas, you will always do best to suppose you know nothing about your speech at the outset and commit to treading this long, circuitous journey of revelation. The danger of not doing so and anticipating your success prematurely is that you trip up when it’s too late to recover.

* * *

I can’t promise that this book will magically turn you into a brilliant wordsmith. What I can do is show you how to notice things that I notice—the observations that motivate my hundreds of questions, the subsequent investigations of which turn a mediocre narrative into a smart, gutsy, and emotionally resonant address.

You don’t have to be a literary mastermind or to have climbed a mountain (and onto a TED stage) to be a brilliant speaker. As Chef Gusteau says in that grade-school cult classic Ratatouille, “Anybody can cook.” It doesn’t mean everyone will be able to use truffles like Thomas Keller. But it acknowledges that everyone can make something that leaves their guests wanting more.

First, you have to know how to ask the right questions.

Here’s mine. Are you ready?

À l’attaque!


Copyright © 2022 by Victoria Wellman.