1 day ago
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I never understood quite how much public speaking came with being a writer, because after I wrote my first book no one asked me to do any. They didn’t ask after my second book either. That was fine with me: I had never done any public speaking and, like all normal people, I was terrified of the prospect.
Then in 2014, with the publication of my fourth book still a couple of weeks away, I was invited to a literary festival. I hadn’t been to many literary festivals, but for some reason I was sure I knew what to expect: a kindly interviewer would sit on stage with me, a small table holding a pitcher of water between us, and ask me a lot of softball questions about my process. I wasn’t comfortable with this either, but I said yes.
When I arrived the evening before my scheduled appearance, one of the organisers offered to show me the venue: a small inflatable tent in the town square. There was an event in progress, and I couldn’t help but notice the absence of an interviewer, or a table with water on it. The author was standing alone, with a headset microphone on, speaking to about 80 people. I watched in horror.
“How long do the talks last?” I asked. “About 50 minutes,” said the organiser. “We like to leave time for questions.”
My first thought was: if I’d known I was going to have to give a speech, I wouldn’t have come. My second thought was: I don’t have a speech.
My brain lurched into survival mode: in a matter of hours I would be pushed out of a plane; it was time to fashion a parachute. I went back to my hotel room and cobbled together a talk out of old anecdotes, recent personal humiliations and stuff robbed from the book I was meant to be promoting. At the appointed hour, my heart slamming against my chest wall, I walked over to the tent and read the words aloud.
It went OK; not great. There were a few laughs, and a number of bewildered silences. But the inflatable venue didn’t collapse as the organisers warned me it would if I opened the back door and fled. Against my instincts, I stayed put.
Unfortunately, there is no great secret to overcoming a fear of public speaking. You just have to do it, be not very good at it, and have an inkling you can do better next time. But after that festival I had something else: a template – a slightly lame, not-quite-50-minutes-long speech scrawled on seven sides of A4.
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I went back to my room and circled everything in the speech that worked, and crossed out everything that didn’t. Any line that got an unintentional laugh stayed in – from now on it would be intentional. I delivered a modified version of that emergency speech over the years, and it got a little better each time. It also got a little easier each time – the terror I felt before stepping on stage gradually reduced to a fidgety hum one could almost confuse with excitement.
Along the way I have had some opportunities to appear with an interviewer and a pitcher of water, but to be honest I’d rather do the 50 minutes on my own. That way I’m in control of everything except the questions at the end.
