When to start writing your speech (and when not to)…

When you are prepared enough to know you won’t need one…

You’ve been asked to give a speech a month from now, maybe 10 or 15 minutes either on a topic of your choice or one chosen by your host. You want to invest some time in doing your homework and choosing your words carefully, so that you know what you’re talking about and how to talk about it to the audience you expect to encounter.

When do you start writing the speech?

You may think it depends on what type of speech it is you are giving. This is certainly the view of one of my favourite writers, Tim Urban, the blogger behind Wait But Why, who identified three broad types of speeches (winging it, using a set structure, and following an exact script) when documenting his own experience of writing a TED talk, which I invite you to watch after you’ve read his dramatic account of how it was written.

However, I hope to convince you that the type of speech you are giving should have little bearing on when you start writing it. This is mainly because I’ve given an awful lot of them now and have learnt this lesson the hard way.

The vast majority of speeches I have ever given fit into No 2 (using a set structure) of Tim’s three speech types. My experience of running a debate club for the better part of a decade means I have either been giving these speeches or helping other people give them every two weeks since 2009. This tallies up to about 150 debates, not counting the ones I have spoken at in other people’s clubs and events.

The several times I have delivered a Type 1 speech (winging it) have normally happened when I’ve had to stand in at the last minute for someone who had planned a Type 2 speech or when I have been giving an interview to a journalist or a radio station.

All of my Type 3 speeches (following an exact script) have been entries for speaking competitions plus my so far one and only TEDx talk (not the same as a TED talk).

So what exactly is it that I have learned and why did I have to learn it the hard way?

1. Preparing for a speech and writing a speech are two different things
   If this sounds like a statement of the obvious, bear with me. Preparing your speech is the part where you work out what you want to say and research the facts, statistics, and stories that you will need to back it up. This is a time for reading, thinking, and discussing with others. Writing your speech is simply the act of organising those thoughts into a coherent structure and recording the few things you absolutely need to get right, like lengthy quotes, data sets, and sound bites.
2. Understanding your message is more important than remembering it
   You might think one was not possible without the other, but you’d be surprised. In my time as a debate coach, I have seen countless speakers obsess over the wording of what they insist is a killer line that will knock their audience for six, but are at a total loss when I take their notes away and ask them to explain what that line means and what they expect it to prove to their audience. That’s because once you start writing, you become instantly more committed to whatever idea you had in your head at the time, even if it is still under-developed. As a result, instead of refining the idea itself, you devote your resources to refining the language used to express it. What comes out may sound beautiful (to you), but will likely mean little to everyone else. This becomes a particularly big problem if that idea is subjected to scrutiny, such as a question from the audience or a cross-examination.
3. Trust yourself to remember what matters and to forget what doesn’t
   Paul McCartney said in an interview a couple of years ago that dozens of Beatles songs were never written because they were simply forgotten. He thought this made the songs they did release even better, something echoed by John Lennon decades earlier when he said the only songs he forgot were the ones not worth remembering. Let’s be clear, though, this isn’t a license to do nothing until the last minute. All that time should be spent ‘preparing’ for your speech. However in that time, you will forget things: arguments, stories, analogies, and sound bites with which you probably imagined yourself dazzling your audience when you came up with them. Relax: whatever you forget will most likely be replaced by something better, clearer, more consistent, and easier to understand. Even if it actually was gold dust after all, one line doesn’t make a speech great, it just makes a great speech memorable. So, if forgetting it is the price of producing a better speech overall, it is totally worth it.

The reason I had to learn this the hard way is because up until four years ago, I would have flatly disagreed with it. I had been trying to win an annual speaking competition, organised by the College of Public Speaking, called the Corporate Challenge, for the previous three years. Each time, I had written out a full script — after going through about 7 first drafts — and memorised it to perfection. 6 minutes of pure gold, I had convinced myself, and yet each time I went out in the first round, sounding wooden and stilted as I recited my script to a panel of judges whose approval I so desperately sought.

In 2013, I finally gave up trying to impress anyone. I entered the competition — more out of habit than anything else — and I simply did the same thing I would do for any one of the dozens of debates I had spoken in previously: I spent a few weeks thinking and talking about the theme, but wrote nothing until half an hour before I was due to go up. It was one of the best talks I had ever given. I was present the whole time, talking to the judges and not at them. I moved seamlessly from point to point as I made my case and I did it largely on the spot because I already knew exactly what I wanted to say and so the words came to me as and when I needed them. Some great lines were forgotten and I even stumbled over my words occasionally, but the end product was better than any of the scripts I had laboured over in the past as the judges testified in their feedback.

I didn’t win, but I did make the final and finished in third place, which was enough to change my outlook. And in case you’re wondering, this is what a speech that was written 30 minutes before it was delivered after weeks of ‘preparation’ looks like:

So, when should you start writing that speech? When you are prepared enough to know you won’t need one to be able to tell your audience what you have to say. That’s when.