Your Speechwriter: An Operator’s Manual

by David Murray
This post originally appeared on The Strategist via PRSA

[ikon images/corbis]

As far as PR positions go, the speechwriter probably has one of the most interesting (and borderline absurd) jobs. One describes his marching orders from the CEO as: “Write down my thoughts as if I had them.”

Until recently, this group didn’t have a formal forum to share what they do. But with the advent of the Professional Speechwriters Association (PSA) this past winter, we can now look into the realities of this position, thanks to the recently released results of its first-ever membership survey. The survey yielded insights about modern speechwriters that their managers and colleagues might find useful, as they try to coax sustainable excellence from this peculiar, but potentially powerful PR position.

The first thing to know about speechwriters is that many of them prefer to be referred to as something else. In fact, an argument broke out among the delegates at the first World Conference of the PSA about this point:

“The term ‘speechwriter’ is limiting,” someone said, questioning the wisdom of the name of the new association. One suggestion was to call it the “Leadership Communication Association,” in order to acknowledge the broader role that so many speechwriters have: building thought leadership platforms, crafting executive messages for many media and coaching executives through various communication opportunities.

But other speechwriters rose to the defense of the old term. One person said it’s useful because “it fences me off” from others in the organization who would water the job down with other duties. A self-proclaimed “speechwriter” is a kind of brand that “excites people,” as opposed to broader but blander descriptors such as “executive communicator.”

Don’t hide your speechwriter

The PSA survey revealed that speechwriters are older, more likely to be male, better educated, and better paid than their colleagues in public relations. The typical speechwriter is a 51-year-old man with a master’s degree. More than half of the speechwriters surveyed make more than $100,000 annually, with 23 percent pulling in more than $150,000 (and half of those making more than $200,000).

Speechwriters are also more likely than their well-coiffed PR colleagues to be unkempt, unruly, unconventional—or all of the above. But do not punish them for this. Every organization should have one person who is deeply—and perhaps even a little single-mindedly—devoted to helping the leader articulate the organization’s point of view as compellingly as possible.

Most leaders know this and will tolerate—and sometimes embrace—a little eccentricity in a person who helps them sound, look, and feel better in front of important audiences.


Help out your speechwriter

Even with the best client-speechwriter chemistry—JFK called his speechwriter Ted Sorensen “my intellectual blood bank”—the speechwriter struggles to get sufficient access to achieve a real mind-meld with the boss.

Now add the litany of common troubles that PSA members listed in the survey: solitude, short deadlines, slow workflows, lawyers, and indifference.

Speechwriters resent clients who “don’t care about content”—and bureaucrats who care too much: “I have to contend with constant micromanaging by people who see risk lurking in every corner and are afraid of letting the CEO take any kind of position,” one survey participant said. “They also have no feel for what constitutes good writing, yet exert a huge influence over the process.”

A PR manager should not be one of those risk-averse bureaucrats. And when the lawyers or the HR staff or the compliance people start sucking the life from a piece of leadership communication, fight valiantly on your speechwriter’s behalf.

Even if you don’t win, your speechwriter will appreciate having an ally instead of one more institutional enemy.


Know what makes your speechwriter happy

Asked what they like most about their work, speechwriters said “shaping public debates,” “finding and telling stories,” “intellectual and creative challenge and reward,” “the variety of topics and amazing people that I get to work with” and “the silent hours when I, through writing, try to understand and share something important.”

Speechwriters are like snowflakes; some succeed precisely because they’re CEO whisperers. But many of the ones worth keeping around are the oddest and most difficult to please. They have razor intellects, a restless curiosity and healthy—if not slightly obese—egos.

But remember, lots of speechwriters are older. So they know by now that life in leadership communication will not lay itself neatly before them. So if they can see that they are achieving something significant with their work, if they can be intellectually stimulated, if they feel that someone, somewhere in the organization believes that the corporate strategy can be advanced by articulate rhetoric and communication, they will stick around and keep giving their best, despite it all.

Thirty years ago, a corporate speechwriter wrote, “No one is recording these speeches. There are no books of them that readers save and treasure. Our files will be tossed on the scrap heap when we leave or retire. But we have been sitting at a typewriter making land, a sea, a sky, burning words. That’s enough. It is more than most have.”

In the end, it’s all your speechwriter requires. That, and a salary somewhere in the low six figures.

But in exchange for helping your organization’s top leadership communicate compellingly, is that too much to ask?

Blank Page, Blue Sky

by David Murray

I get it on the golf course every time I'm paired with a stranger. There's a wait on the fourth tee, and the guy says, "So what do you do for a living?"

(I generally want to avoid this conversation because I like to keep golf separate from life—the reason I play in the first place. Similarly, I don't take my business cards to bed with me in case I meet a potentially useful new contact in my dreams.)

"I'm a writer," I say, never able to hide the pride. It's cool to be a writer. It's old. It's elemental. It's a little like announcing that you're a fisherman or a hunter (or a clown or a prostitute). "Am a writer," my novelist mother once wrote. "Get to call myself that because I write."

But then there is dread. Dread because the response is so perfectly predictable.

"Oh, wow!" Pause, two seconds. "What sort of writing do you do?"

That last question means, "How on earth do you make a living? Or is your wife an investment banker and you're actually a bum and that's why you're on the golf course in the middle of the week?"

My pride forces me to convince the fellow that I do make a living, by hook and by crook, an exercise I resent. Once I've achieved this, his next line, if it's not the worst case ("I've got a story you should write!") is something to the effect of how interesting my work must be.

Which I take as a confession about how boring his life must be.

My old man, an advertising writer, used to see everyone else's job as a nightmare of tedium. Even a doctor! He said: "Can you imagine, day after day, hour after hour, patient after patient, describing the same symptoms over and over as if they were just the most important thing in the world? And you having to listen gravely, even though in most cases you know from the moment they walk into the office that you're going to prescribe amoxicillan."

Glad Dad wasn't a doctor? Me too. But maybe he was on to something. Maybe a writer does have a kind of blue sky that others don't. But the writer also has a blank page to contend with. (A bus driver once told me he pitied writers when he opened up the newspaper and tried to imagine some poor wretch having to write all those words!) A writer's work isn't done for him in the form of a full waiting room. A writer's work, however familiar the subject has become, must be done from scratch.

“People would say I must have had such a great life doing this, people who were engineers, doctors, insurance salesmen or whatever,” said radio comedy writer Tom Koch, who died last week. “But it was the kind of work where every morning I would wake up and think, ‘My God, I wonder if I can do it again today.’ There is no way you prepare to do it, or even know how you do it.”

And maybe that's the best thing about it.

This post originally appeared on Vital Speeches of the Day.

Around the Word

Here's the latest in our regular roundup of literary news.

Cover chosen for Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman. 
Michael Morrison notes that the jacket “draws on the style of the decade the book was written, but with a modern twist.” The cover, featuring a 1950s train forging off into the distance, touches “literally and figuratively on the book's content.” Surely, in contemporary celebrity fashion, Harper Lee’s fans will line up for half a mile just to catch a glimpse of the 88-year-old author’s winning smile.

Nine Launches, One Book
Can you be in nine places at once? In May, he folks at McPherson & Company, in an innovative experiment, will inhabit nine parallel universes—well, nine different bookstores—to launch the multi-author essay collection Every Father’s Daughter. Nine of the book's 20+ authors will host a simultaneous talk, with readers at one shop being able to Skype their questions to authors across the country. Join Gotham Ghostwriters (in nine separate realities) as we congratulate their achievement.

Centennial Stories
Best American Short Stories is celebrating its 100th birthday! Far from being infirm, crotchety, or behind the times, the series is vigorously planning a special anniversary edition to celebrate becoming a centenarian. 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories will feature seminal works from the last century, with contributions from literary luminaries such as George Saunders, John Cheever, Sherman Alexie, Edna Ferber, and many more.

To Self-Publish or Not to Self-Publish?
Lulu recently published an infographic based on a survey conducted by Digital Book World and Writer’s Digest, touting the benefits of going indie (self-publishing). Traditionalists beware! The revelations of the changing publishing landscape are gothic and dire. However, while the enticing “Indie Math” may lead writers to believe that navigating the dense forest of self-marketing is profitable, the article goes on to describe how difficult a venture this can prove.