Sunday, July 24, 2005
Confessions of a Freelance Speechwriter
I remember the day I told my professional colleagues that I was quitting my job in government communications. They emailed me back saying how brave I was-which I took as a codeword for how stupid I was. Here I was quitting my good paying, fully pensioned, health-cared job to make money as a flak for hire. I could visualize them rolling their eyes, thinking I had taken leave of my senses. How could I choose the most boring form of writing, I could hear them muttering, reflecting I suppose on all the boring speeches they had heard or written.
I took the other view. I hated all the other stuff. The endless meetings. The bureaucratic rules. Everything that actually got in the way of doing your job. I had written and/or vetted a ton of speeches on the job, so I knew I had the skill set. I had also come across a statistic that said that in the U.S. alone more than 100,000 speeches were given every 24 hours. I also knew that most speakers didn't write their own. Hmm. There might be a market here. And my timing was great because in 1993/4 e-mail was just beginning to become commonplace. That meant I could deliver speeches to potentially any client anywhere rather than being restricted to my home city.
So I flung caution to the winds and dove off the deep end. And never regretted it for a moment.
But before you chuck your good paying, fully pensioned, heath-cared job-let me give you a checklist of the pros and cons of the freelance life.
On the plus side, being a freelance speechwriter can be endlessly fascinating because you never know what you are going to be asked to write about. It could be on anything and everything. Social policy. Health or environmental initiatives. Labor relations and worker compensation. Banking. Corporate social responsibility. International affairs. Finance. Or any other topic under the sun.
The second plus is that we sometimes get to rub shoulders with the rich and semi-famous. With people who perhaps in other circumstances are out of our league. I mean no self-deprecation by this. It's just that under normal circumstances I don't get to hang out with multi-millionaires, or captains of industry, or senior members of government. But when they turn their attention to the words that will come out of their mouths-they want to talk to their speechwriters. And they want to talk to them now! So, we are brought into their professional circle for a short time-a momentary vicarious thrill if you will.
What else? We don't often get roped into office politics or useless meetings. Our clients really like us because we are saving them their most precious of commodity-time. And, oh yes, the pay is pretty good.
But the most satisfying part of freelancing for me is this. As speechwriters we may not make policy, but we sure get to "nuance" it. The first time you hear your words on a 15-second sound bite on the evening news-you suddenly realize that you sometimes get to articulate the first expression of a new policy or service. And if you do a really good job, you might find that articulation becomes an oft- repeated mantra within your client's organization.
The downside: We work like dogs. Because we have clients across time zones we get phone calls at very strange hours. We have to be prepared to work on "emergency" speeches which can mean many lost weekends and late nights. We need to have very understanding families.
The consequences of error are huge. Nobody is going to be doing detailed fact checking of our research. Embarrass clients just once by putting incorrect facts or clumsy syntax in their mouths, and we won't hear from them again. Not ever. Quite right too.
The joy of sharing their passions notwithstanding- once you have agreed to a speech assignment you are pretty much on your own. All communications directors want to know is if you can do the job. If the answer is "yes" they are on to other things. There won't be a lot of hand holding.
Like a news reporter you will have to do a lot of mining for sum and substance-and do it all with a certain finesse so you don't upset any political apple carts. You have to be able to absorb huge amounts of new information, all the while understanding you won't be using 98 percent of it. But you have to inhale the useless stuff so you can exhale the truly useful.
You have to have very finely tuned political antenna. You may be writing a speech for the CEO, but you aren't a senior member of his or her staff. Heck, your clients might not even want to let their people know that they are using freelancers. So you can't go blundering around like a wounded walrus when you go digging for information.
Did I say the pay is pretty good? Well it is. But not nearly what it should be. And as for that rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous, for every speech that happens with, you will have 20 others where you never meet the client, many of whom are thousands of miles away.
Your brains can get fried and sometimes you wonder when burnout will come. Or if you can ever have another original thought for a long-term client.
Perhaps I have depressed you right out of quitting your day job. Perhaps that's a good thing. If you want to be a prophet honored in your own time, don't be a freelance speechwriter.
You will be confined to relative anonymity. The best you can hope for is a good reputation in the communications community and perhaps "he wrote good rah-rah" as your epitaph. But it is such fun"rah- rah".
If I had my life as a do-over, I would be a Hollywood script writer writing dialogue. Since I am way too old for that demographic, at least I get to work in the shadows writing monologue. I get to put words in other people's mouths. I get paid to do it. And I never know what the next phone call will bring.
Pretty cool.
