Speechwriting is like: going for a walk

For my first blog post of 2022, I will return to the subject I have dedicated three previous posts to: speechwriting analogies.

Why evaluate different analogies to speechwriting? Well, I’ve got to write about something. But my main motivation is because the work of speechwriters – what we do and how we do it – is not as well understood as it could be. And I think any exercise which enhances our understanding of a profession has value. And it’s partly because there is no one “thing” which speechwriting, or indeed any form of writing, is most like. Comparing different analogies can help us to appreciate how (speech)writers approach their craft.

With that in mind, today I want to consider if speechwriting is anything like going for a walk.

Much has been written about the association between walking and creative ideas. Walking, according to the most popular theories, helps us to decompress, leave some stresses behind, and explore old problems and ideas from new angles. We’ve all had the experience of a walk helping to dislodge a stubborn problem.

And, as this Farnham Street blog post explains, many of history’s most eminent thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche and Immanuel Kant, have also been committed walkers. Nietzsche apparently wrote The Wanderer and His Shadow by walking alone for up to eight hours a day and scribbling his notes in a small notebook. Kant, meanwhile, was well-known during his life for his rigid, austere daily routines, to the point that he supposedly never left his hometown of Königsberg in his 79 years of life. He also walked the same route each day. So consistent was this route that it has come to be called ‘The Philosopher’s Walk’. It is said that he only ever altered the route of his daily constitutional twice: once to obtain an early copy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, and to join the clamour for news after the outbreak of the French Revolution.

Despite this close association between walking and thought, it’s not actually what I wanted to explore today. The catalyst for today’s exploration is a fascinating post from The Convivial Society newsletter about the collapse of narrative in the era of digital media. 

Although the entire post, and everything I’ve read from the newsletter to date, is well worth engaging with, the paragraph which particularly piqued my interest is in the Databases and Narratives section. The author, L.M. Sacasas, presents and then neatly summarises a dense academic quote as follows:

In other words, when you read a narrative, for example, you are encountering the product of a series of choices that have already been made for you by the author out of a myriad of possibilities from the database of language. The countless other choices that were possible are present only to the imagination. You see the words the author chose, not the ones she could’ve chosen. You see the path marked out for you as a reader, not the multiple paths that were rejected. 

This itself reminded me of the short story The Garden of Forking Paths, by the Argentine maestro Jorge Luis Borges. 

But more than anything else, it reminded me of the perfectly quotidian pastime of going for a walk. When setting out for a walk, I often try to push aside most conscious thoughts and allow my mind to freely wander. But there is at least one thing which requires some cognitive attention: deciding on a path. A walk is an accumulation of choices made about roads to walk down and, implicitly, roads ignored.

Why does this work as an analogy to speechwriting? Because both for speeches and the kind of idle afternoon walks that help inspire us, the journey is more important than the destination.

Think about it this way: when it comes to a speech, the destination is subordinate to the journey, because the success of the journey that you can take your audience on is what determines if you reach your destination or not. 

Goals like increased sales, or a successful campaign launch, or inspiring a graduating student cohort can only be achieved if the audience is persuaded over the course of the journey.

What is the journey in speechwriting? It’s the series of decisions the writer and speaker make together: decisions about words, phrases, jokes, anecdotes, metaphors and more. Whether we consciously recognise each decision as such or not, we make hundreds of them. And every decision made in the course of writing and delivering a speech is like choosing which street to go down, which alley to duck through, which bridge to cross, where to stop and gaze out at the majesty of nature, encountered in a walk. It is the set of possible choices remaining after all other possible choices have been eliminated. And it is why, ultimately, it is the journey – much more than the destination – that we remember long after the speech is over.