SN editor tells potential client he wants to write
only speeches that communicate
A couple weeks ago a mildly frantic-sounding woman called and e-mailed to tell me the president of her global insurance company was looking for a freelance speechwriter.
Before flipping through my mental Rolodex of freelance speechwriters I could recommend, I asked her for some details about the president's previous experiences with speechwriters, his needs, his expectations, etc.
I didn't hear back from her for a week.
When I did hear back, she informed me that I was one of the three finalists for the job!
She added that the president himself would provide all the details in a telephone interview and could I do that interview tomorrow.
I said I could, and asked myself: Did I really want to do this job? The answer was, Nounless this could be a truly special speechwriting relationship.
After we got the pleasantries out of the way and talked a little bit about our backgrounds, I told him I don't take a lot of speechwriting assignments. And I told him why: "In my experience, lots of speechwriting is done for speakers who are giving speeches as favors to audiences they don't know awfully well and to whom they don't have focused messages to deliver."
I told him I don't consider myself adept at writing such speeches and added furthermore, that I had little interest in learning how to write such speeches.
He couldn't have agreed with me more! He said he very much appreciated me for saying what I'd said about the proper nature of speech communication. He even repeated my little speech in his own words and added that he'd felt this way for a long time.
And after a few more affable moments during which we both recognized that I wasn't the guy for the job, we happily hung upexecutive communication soul mates, going our separate ways.
