Back from the Professional Speechwriters Association conference in Washington. A pleasure to meet so many smart and engaging professionals from the wide and varied world of speechwriting. Not least the pugnacious but gracious Hal Gordon, a co-contributor to PunditWire, whose startling knowledge of Othello puts me well to shame. And many others. Here is a Twitter hashtag with some of the live thoughts as the event unfolded.

Different sessions ran to and fro over different professional experiences and issues. How to get rich(er) in the speechwriting business? Treat it 100% as a business – be businesslike, especially on marketing! Should there be a professional Code of Ethics for speechwriters? Maybe. But what to include in it? And why not invite clients to sign some ethical standards too (eg on the number of times they can demand rewrites)? Are women under-represented in top-end speechwriting? And can only women do a good job writing speeches for women about ‘women’s issues’?

Three sessions stood out for me. In fact four stood out, but one of them was a case-study in how to be completely staggeringly dismal in giving a presentation, so we’ll tip-toe sadly past that one.

Lissa Muscatine gave us all a frank and fascinating account of her life and times as Hillary Clinton’s speechwriter from her days as First Lady onwards, including the political and diplomatic intrigue in the days and hours before Hillary Clinton’s famous 1995 Beijing speech: women’s rights are human rights! Lissa is no longer part of the inner Hillary campaign team but while she stayed scrupulously loyal she did not hide her disappointment at the way things currently were going with the current campaign: the ‘intellectual’ Hillary seemed (she said) to be squashing the ‘human’ Hillary to no good effect. [Note: it must be a grim job for Hillary’s current speechwriters trying to find words that sound convincing but also deflect very specific accusations that she has done some seriously illegal things with her private email server. Might she blow up or melt down under the strain?]

Then we had a panel of five US Presidential speechwriters from Richard Nixon(!) through to President Obama talking about their experiences in writing White House speeches in observing different moments of high crisis (including the legendary Reagan address to the nation after the Challenger disaster). Key point: if you have only a short time to draft something under extreme pressure, it won’t be too bad. Ronald Reagan liked the first draft of his Challenger speech but wanted added language aimed directly at America’s children on the need to take risks to achieve great things. Watch his unsurpassed final message, bearing in mind the frantic work that went on behind the scenes by Peggy Noonan to prepare these sad, solemn yet stirring words for him at breakneck speed: “The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave”.

Finally, Dain Dunston gave the conference a sparkling lesson in how to both craft and deliver a speech with style and intensity. See lots about him here. He started strongly, taking his cue from Charles Dickens: “speechwriting is the best of jobs and the worst of jobs” and went on to share passages from his new novel about a speechwriter who makes a joke that being a failed CEO is the best job in the world (lots of money and no responsibility), only to find someone interested in hiring him…

My own contribution to this fine gathering was a short session on cultural aspects of speechwriting in which I looked at some practical issues (interpreters, checking details, humour etc). My main point was that in the ‘Western’ public speaking world, senior speakers typically aimed to reduce the distance between themselves and their audiences by being humorous, easy to follow, folksy and maybe self-deprecating. This was not the case elsewhere: in much of the world the whole point of a speech was to emphasise the speaker’s inexorable superiority: boring words and phrases were just the job in showing just how far above the masses the leader soared.

Conclusion?

Speechwriters in the USA have all sorts of opportunities to sell their wares for significant money, and so enjoy talking about their experiences. Over here in Europe it’s a much less ambitious and effective art-form. Still, on we go.

I remain available for hire to anyone wanting my mind. And I hope to be writing some pieces for Vital Speeches of The Day in due course, with a view to briskly dissecting notable speeches for technique and substance. Plus the hard copy of my book reincarnated and rebooted as Speeches for Leaders is in the works. Watch this space.