Freelance writer Cynthia Starks says “projects are the new job interviews,” as employers are asking speechwriters to create “new material or undergo writing ‘tests’—in addition to providing writing samples from their portfolios and/or websites—when being considered for work by new clients or organizations.”
A May 10 Harvard Business Review story backs her up on this trend toward “project-lications” or “appli-jects,” as these tryouts are called.
Starks: “If the trends in this article hold true, more and more potential clients and organizations will ask us to produce new, ‘in the moment’ work before they make any of us an offer. I say, ‘Bring it on!’”
I say, hold on a cotton pickin’ minute. When I was editorial director at a publishing company in Chicago, I used to have a boss who insisted I bring new people in and make them work for us for a week as a sort of tryout. I objected on grounds that only a no-account nitwit had a week to spare “trying out” to work at our little publishing out fit.
(Although trying out to work at a place could save the tryer-out some pain; you know the story of Kurt Vonnegut, hired in the early days of Sports Illustrated. Vonnegut labored half a day over a caption for a photo of a racehorse who leapt he rail at the Aqueduct track. Vonnegut fled, never to return. The only evidence of his work was a sheet he left in his typewriter, containing the caption, “The horse jumped over the fucking fence.”)
But mainly, companies demanding to “try out” a worker had at least be willing to pay for the work done, so that the worker can say he or she is trying out the company, too. Imagine making a loading dock employee work a day to see how strong her back is and how well she gets along with the rest of the crew. That would be plainly exploitive.
Then why should speechwriters, or anyone else, do original work for free? Only because they’re desperate. And once a company establishes that, the work relationship is off to an unequal start.
I say, if you want to work for the company take the writing test, do the project; but demand to be paid for your time. —DM
In a smart piece on President Obama’s “bathroom humor” at the recent White House Correspondents dinner, former President Reagan speechwriter Hal Gordon harked back to President Roosevelt, who knew how to use humor to achieve more than just cheap laughs:
FDR had endured some particularly vitriolic attacks from that journalistic Rottweiler, Henry Louis Mencken—who, of course, was present for the festivities.
When FDR got up to speak, he immediately launched into a furious denunciation of the American news establishment. Roughly, he said the following: “The average American newspaper, especially the so-called better sort, has the intelligence of a Baptist evangelist, the courage of a rat, the fairness of a prohibitionist boob-bumper, the information of a high-school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid valentines, and the honor of a police-station lawyer.”
Jaws dropped. Journalists rubbed their eyes in disbelief. Ominous mutterings were heard. Had the president lost his mind? Whatever provocation he may have felt that he had been offered by the press, how dare he attack respectable journalists like that!
FDR ignored the mutterings, flashed his trademark grin, and then detonated an even bigger bomb: “Of course,” he said soothingly, “you realize that these are not my opinions. I’m simply quoting my good friend Henry Mencken.”
Roosevelt had put the nation’s journalists through the wringer and hung them out to dry. And he had done it in such a way that it was impossible for them to take him to task for it.
It’s a pity that the smart young things in Mr. Obama’s White House don’t read more history. They might have imitated FDR instead of George Carlin.
Now, it’s not cool for a middle-aged fellow like Hal Gordon to dismiss White House speecwhriters as “smart young things.” Political speechwriting has long been staffed mostly by younger people. Smart? Well, there are lots of kinds of intelligence; among the rarest is Hal Gordon’s: The man can recite huge swaths of literature from memory, and to call him erudite is to avoid calling him a savant-of-everything.
Though there was never a time when people like Hal Gordon dominated the ranks of speechwriting, every communication department worth its salt had one real intellectual in it—a grown-up who could handle the heavy stuff: The stuff that required an understanding of history, that benefited from a mastery of literature and philosophy.
I recently wrote a magazine story on a major political figure. I asked the young press secretary chief a simple question about the man’s growing up years, in the 1950s. She deliberately and crassly mischaracterized my question then, after specifying that her answer was off the record, dismissed it “pretty absurd.” It was nothing of the sort. But I didn’t take offense, because I realized: What choice did she have? To whom on the politician’s staff could she turn to answer a question that required knowledge of the context of the 1950s? No one. So she got rid of me quick, and left my story—and her boss’s story—without his representation.
And I thought then—as Hal Gordon thought, listening to the President’s silly speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner—these people could use an old lady or gentleman who’s read some books and lived some history.
They say you shouldn’t drink while you’re writing, but it’s okay to write while you’re drinking. Judging from a whiskey-enhanced outburst I made on my personal blog recently, both ideas are probably bad.
But damn it, I had a point about the White House Correspondents’ Dinner boiling down to, “the president and the top Washington journalists publicly declaring that, in the end, it all really is a game. And then, a week later, wondering why people call them ‘elites.’”
The event simply shouldn’t take place.
I think speechwriters should be much more engaged in debating—among themselves and with their clients—the proper occasions for speeches.
For instance, the State of the Union speech might have some cultural currency, but the State of the Company speech is just a waste of everybody’s time. Send the employees the deck, speak powerfully to the single most important theme of the year, and then open the thing up for conversation.
And, less outrageous but more common and corrosive, the speech delivered as a favor to an event organizer or as flattery to an audience. And if it were up to me, there would be no such thing as a “ceremonial speech.”
You might or might not agree. But speechwriters shouldn’t just defend their best lines. They should have strong opinions—that they share in job interviews—about what speeches are and are not for, when they should and should not be delivered.
I’ll be the first to start. If I get invited to write remarks for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner—which, granted, now seems fairly unlikely—I will turn the job down. I give you my sober promise. —DM
On The Morning Joe this morning, someone said Marco Rubio could have handled this better. I’ll be damned if I know how. He smiled, apologized, and went on with the show. —DM
Glynn Young wrote speeches from the mid-1970s to the mid 2000s. For 30 years he wondered if he had lost his own writing voice—or whether he’d ever had one in the first place. He needn’t have, as he recently wrote.
But the truth is, he shouldn’t have. He should have been writing, as he does today with poems and blog posts and books, his ass off.
He was busy with work, raising a family all of that. Yes, aren’t we all.
I write my personal blog every day—not because the world wants something from me every day beyond what I write for vsotd.com and various other magazines and newspapers—but because I need to hear myself think for myself every day. And writing is how I think.
I worry about a lot of things in this life. But losing my voice—maybe because it’s my single greatest fear—is not one of them.
I can’t go into details, because the gentleman who runs the thing is a law school graduate. He abruptly cut the exchange off and in a dark tone that he must have learned in law school, asked me to keep the conversation confidential.
All I can tell you is what I would tell any person who claimed to be able to give people a speech for cheap:
Speechwriting isn’t expensive because clients are stupid enough to pay. It’s expensive because it (ostensibly) involves talented writers spending real time getting to know clients who really want to communicate something specific to a particular group of people. That’s what communication is. What you’re doing almost necessarily disregards the speaker, the occasion and the audience in favor of operational efficiency. It doesn’t do anybody any good—especially first-class speechwriters, who often have to fight the utterly incorrect impression that communication is easy and should come cheap.
I would ask the person to ask, “What kind of business am I in? Am I doing some good in the world? Or am I just contributing more banality to a world already bathing in it?”
Come to think of it, that’s a question we all ought to ask ourselves—even fancy-pants types, who make more than teenage babysitters. —DM
It was bound to happen. Somebody was going to realize that speechwriting and rocket science are two different disciplines. An entrepreneurial-minded fellow, probably a young attorney always found writing to be pretty easy, was inevitably going to create a speechwriting service that would turn out great speeches fast and cheap, thus exposing an entire profession for a bunch of hopelessly spoiled, outmoded laggards.
Behold speeches4less.com, the site where you can get a speech in five days for $5 per 500 words. (Corporate speeches run a little more, naturally. They start at $5 per 500 words.)
I know, right? Scary stuff!
I used the site’s Quote Request Form to ask for a 3,000-word keynote speech for a speechwriting conference, where I plan to announce the end of the speechwriting profession as we know it. “I’d like to have it as soon as possible, because I want to start rehearsing it right away. As you can imagine, it’s going to come as quite an unpleasant shock to professional speechwriters, and I want to have this talk DOWN!”
“Thanks for requesting a corporate speechwriting quote. We appreciate your interest in our services.”
That’s how I lead off my latest McMurry.com post, where I argue that corporate communication is actually easy, because audiences are so benumbed by corporate drivel that the faintest whiff of reality acts like a rhetorical smelling salt. —DM
So yesterday I got an e-mail from a guy I know who’s writing a book on CEO communication.
“One of the things I’d like to include is how a reprint of a CEO’s speech in Vital Speeches of the Day can be beneficial to a company. I can’t find any mention of this on your website or elsewhere. I’m looking for something like influence in Washington, prestige in the business community, etc., preferably with examples. Can you help?”
I could not, I had to confess:
I really don’t have examples on what a Vital Speeches speech has gotten CEOs or their companies. The main thing is, it gets them whatever they make out of it to a large extent. The more broadly the company distributes the reprint—especially if it’s a true humdinger of a speech—the more the impact of the thing. Getting published in Vital Speeches, your name appears next to the rest of the people (from the President on down) who are driving the national and global conversation. So it automatically takes your CEO out of the ghetto of the industry and of business, and puts him or her in a broad thought leadership context. In short, it takes you from CNBC to CNN.
I suppose don’t collect anecdotes because I ain’t trying to sell the value of placing speeches in my publication. But if you run across a story about a Vital Speeches placement transforming an executive’s career, yeah: I’d be all ears. And I’ll tell you this: Why don’t I do a little blog post this week mentioning your project and soliciting testimonials on this? I’ll send you any responses I get.
And so I’m asking: What’s the most dramatic benefit you or your CEO or your organization ever received from getting a speech printed in Vital Speeches? I figure it’d be good—for all of us—to know.
Talk to me—here, or privately, at vseditor@mcmurry.com. —DM
