Almost everything good in life starts with an idea.
A new baby? “Hey, let’s have a kid.”
A booming business? “What if instead of buying these things we don’t like, we make really good ones ourselves?”
A 99-yard touchdown? “I put something new in the playbook.”
The same is true for a speech. Here are three stories about speeches sparked by an idea.
Speech one: Consoling the inconsolable.
One of the great privileges of political life is you sometimes need to speak on behalf of everyone else – especially when the moment rises above politics.
Each year, the Premier of Ontario speaks in front of a memorial erected in memory of first offenders – police, firefighters, paramedics – who died in the line of duty.
The audience is very special: the fallen heroes’ sons and daughters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers.
The Premier’s task is to thank the families – and somehow tend to emotional wounds that can never be fully healed.
When I was Premier McGuinty’s communications lead, I wrote this speech, year after year, until I felt I was running out of ideas – until I came up with a new one.
Understandably, Dalton had always directed his remarks to the spouses, sons and daughters in attendance.
But this time, while he recognized and thanked them, he announced that he wanted to speak very directly to the parents of the fallen.
He spoke about the vulnerability that comes with love. He quoted a newspaper columnist who once said that to have a child is to know how it feels to have your heart walking around outside of your body.
He told the moms and dads that, no matter how much pride they may take in their child’s service, he understood that their hearts must feel broken much of the time.
He said that all Ontarians were grateful to them, and they joined him in wishing them peace – that the memories of their sons and daughters might mend their hearts a little each day.
Dalton is one of nine children, and he was a parent of sorts to his younger siblings from early on. He and Terri have four children of their own. It wasn’t an easy speech to give, but this idea turned out to be true to Dalton, whose empathy for parents couldn’t have been more authentic.
I’m sure he joins me in hoping his words provided a measure of solace to families to whom we all owe so much.
Speech Two: Triumph Over Tyranny
One night, late in my office in Whitney Block, across from the Legislature Building, I came across a paper file at least a foot thick.
In it, there were briefing notes that were much more than that.
In fact, the file contained some of the most remarkable stories I ever read.
My boss, the Premier at the time, was scheduled to speak to Ontarians who were survivors of the Holocaust.
Sitting alone, I read page after page, and before long, tears were running down my face.
These people had endured the most horrific experiences one can imagine, mostly as children. They lost siblings and parents and grandparents. They were torn away from their homes, their friends, their communities.
But they hadn’t just survived. They had thrived. They raised families: between them, they had dozens of kids and hundreds of children and grandchildren. They had built communities and made them stronger, opened businesses that became empires, and lived marked by philanthropy, service and love.
They had confronted the worst man could foist upon his fellow man – and yet they were the best of us.
All I had to do, by comparison, was to write a speech honouring them. But I was struggling. I just couldn’t find the words that did justice to their stories.
After several tries, I had an idea.
I wrote something that went like this…
“I was overcome when I read your stories, and this evening, I very much want to find the words that capture the essence of what you’ve faced, who you are, and what you have meant to us, here in Ontario.
“But I fear I have failed. You see…
“Courage doesn’t come close to describing what it must have taken to face such evil and not only survive it, but triumph over it.
“Resilience doesn’t capture what it must mean to lose so many family members and friends – and to go on and have your own children and grandchildren, to build new communities in a new country, to honour memories but embrace the future, most of all.
“And strength seems so terribly inadequate a word when trying to explain how someone can know such hate, at such a tender age – only to come here, to Ontario, and spread so much love.”
Speech three: Pigeon holes are for the birds
Many years ago, I was asked to help a veteran MPP for an event that must have felt like his own funeral.
His name was Monte Kwinter. He needed a speech because he was being honoured at a tribute dinner.
Monte passed a while back. His Wikipedia page describes him as a politician, and he was the oldest person ever to serve in the Ontario Legislature. But he was much more than that, which I found out when I started the speech writing process by interviewing him.
He had a degree in fine arts, specializing in industrial design. He had worked in real estate. He had played important, even leading roles, in B’nai Brith Canada, the Upper Canadian Zoological Society, the Canadian National Exhibition, the Toronto Harbour Commission, the Toronto Humane Society, the Ontario College of Art, and the Molson Indy car race in Toronto. His father owned a meat packing plant that grew into a hot dog empire.
Which is all great. Except every speechwriter looks for a theme – a hook, if you will – to hang a set of remarks on. After all, a speech, like any good story, can’t be about a hundred things. Unless, of course, it can.
After trying to pick one thing about Monte to write about, we crafted a speech tailor made for him – one that, as he announced at its outset, was aimed at the young people in the audience.
“People will try to define you in one way or another,” Monte told them.
“But I’m proof you can be many things, and you can do many things in one lifetime. Don’t let anyone pigeon hole you!”