What do we need to make a good speech?

If you are breathlessly anticipating your speech in the limelight, but don’t dare to call yourself Winston Churchill and possess no greater talent than to stencil, please google, follow those “occasion – audience – purpose – introduction – body – conclusion” and don’t forget shady manipulation techniques in addition. Save yourself an awful lot of time and parturiency and you’ll sound like a simpering smooth-talking dummy. That’s it: anything but fascinating.

But if you are an inevitable high-flier of great zeal, then writing a speech must be a Muses’ challenge for you. The first thing needed is inspiration. Saddle the Pegasus and fly to Mount Helicon where drink from the fountain Hippocrene. Its sacred water imbue all poets with sunny and sweet-scented profusion, it drives them mad – this giddy waterboarding, deep and booming sinking when you are heavily congested with emotional incontinence, passionate impatience, wild excited hoarseness – so full to bursting, full to dying, full to creating. To be more precise, an inspiring source can be found wherever: from Charlie’s expressive speech in “The Great Dictator” that literally dusted down the Nazi regime (how it should be) to the Chicken Kiev speech by George Bush Sr. (how it should not be).

When you are eager to compose revolutionary appeals, hide yourself and your imagination in a lovely lonely place. It takes two to tango – Diogenes’ barrel suits perfectly. A bosom friend of my childhood, Father Tingtang from “Father Tingtang’s Journey” by Donald Bisset always dialed IMGN 1234 to ask advice from his IMaGiNation. In case a weary and flat atmosphere of the forthcoming speech drives you to distraction, imagine all your audience – friends, professors, business partners and bride’s parents – are no longer 21^st century people. They are queens and kings, you are commander-in-chief talking to your army before battle and encouraging warriors, or you are a Nobel winner in front of intellectual beau monde, or a knight who struggles to maintain composure while asking for princess’s hand in marriage. Composing a speech is blissful time to kid ourselves: see luxury instead of shambolic outfit and even preach to speechless birds as Saint Francis of Assisi did somewhere in Alviano or Bevagna.

What I object to is that it is neither audience’s attention nor peers’ recognition, which are crucial in declamation. Never will we teach someone to make a good speech unless he has courage to speak from the heart and to believe his words are true. Blubbering and lying through teeth get up my nose. I want a speaker to shriek, to sparkle, to climb onto the table and bellow “O Captain! My Captain”, I want to see how he gets things – experiences, sufferings, dreams – off his chest, I want him to be so ardently and tenderly in love with ideas and ideals he is talking about. Only when our orator feels his soul entirely on the tip of his tongue, he can arouse similar feelings throughout an auditory.

In a nutshell, here are components of brilliant speech as follows: inspiration, imagination, bravery, love and solitude to yield to a stream of thoughts and spend hours on end in search of a proper line. Nobody can be taught to write a seductive piece, although I believe it is possible to foster a person so he is what he says. It takes all available inner reserves to make your in posse ideas exist as in esse world, but if one put this onus on oneself, he certainly feels like he’s a little bit of God inside.