Saturday, April 14, 2012

Speechwriting for the common man.

For the past few years, I have held this not-so-secret desire to be a speechwriter. I have always wanted to be able to harness the inner emotions and desires of a speaker and give them the words to reach out and grab an audience (and if necessary, shake the hell out of them). I often look for the stories or events in life that call for an extraordinary speech that lifts a congregation out of their seats, beyond their despair, guides them through the haze of uncertainty and through the jungles of doubt and binds them in a common goal for good.

Turns out, unless I am waiting for a global tragedy or a Presidential Inaugural, I might be looking for my moment for a while.

Enter Speechwriting for the common man.

Part humor and part serious, I thought to myself – what if we spent the same amount of time and energy motivating us for average woes or everyday victories? What if we reached out to grab the common-day audience?

I have a couple of “favorites” but one of my top speeches was actually staged. Right before he saddled up to waste a colony of alien invaders, Bill Pullman stepped to the mic as POTUS in the movie Independence Day (Yes, fake speeches count too. Scriptwriters are just the long-distance runners of speechwriting) and rallied the world into believing that regardless of the oncoming global destruction, humans would “…live on, [we’re going to] survive,” the united the entire world into some pretty awesome, worldwide ass kicking.

Now follow me here for a second (I know that can be hard sometimes with the grotesque amount of commas, but I’m not in college anymore and I’ll use incorrect punctuation if I want to), but what if we took the energy of that speech into normal life? Today imagine Bill Pullman screaming, “We will not go quietly into the night. We will not go down without a fight. Today we celebrate our LAUNDRY DAY!” Trust me - that would be the best freaking load of laundry you have ever done.

But what if we spent more time reciting Reagan when determining our path in life ("...sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part 
of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave."
), or Wiesel when battling anxiety, anger, fear, compulsion, depression, or indecision ("Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor ­­ never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees ­­ not
to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity, we betray our own. Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment."
)

We need more moments that lift us to our feet and convince us that the impossible is possible, that self-doubt is an emotion only used to write sappy poetry and pre-teen romance novels. We need more times in life where someone grabs us and lifts us out of our ruts in life, slaps us in the face and convinces that we can conquer our world. We need those speeches.

And we need more speechwriters.

Monday, April 2, 2012

An interesting thought.

An friend relayed this quote today:

"If you do not feel yourself growing in your work and your life broadening and deepening, if your task is not a perpetual tonic to you, you have not found your place." - Orison Swett Marden

It's got me thinking, and you know how much I enjoy doing that...