Ted Widmer: On Writing Speeches for Presidents
[Ted Widmer has a PhD in American history and is a former speechwriter for Bill Clinton.]
In 1948, James R. Masterson and Wendell Brooks Phillips published a satire of Washington writing called "Federal Prose." The verdict, as you might imagine, was not positive. Here is how they translated "too many cooks spoil the broth" into federalese: "Undue multiplicity of personnel assigned either concurrently or consecutively to a single function involves deterioration of quality in the resultant product as compared with the product of the labor of an exact sufficiency of personnel."
The more I learned about speechwriting, the more I realized that it was nothing like other forms of writing. Most literary expression is intensely personal; speechwriting is, by definition, anonymous. It is also a deeply collective enterprise, in which many people join together to say something well. The writer becomes a bit of a journalist, interviewing dozens of specialists, gathering information and then sifting it before putting pencil to paper. A rudimentary form of e-mail allowed early drafts to be circulated and then to work their way up the chain of command, with liposuction and blemish-removal performed at every stage. The sharpest editing was done at the top. Every word spoken by a president becomes the official policy of the United States, so there is no room for a lazy adjective. Or, God forbid, a mistake.
In some ways, you could not imagine a worse environment for creative output. We had pagers that functioned as cattle prods, stunning us into prolixity. Whatever words we generated were government property, and we had to leave our hard drives in our office safes. Late at night, the infinite hallways of the Old Executive Office Building resembled the hotel in "The Shining," with room after room devoted to inscrutable government functions and odd apparitions like jogging Marines (hoo-ah!). Most cubicles were tiny in width and length, but extremely generous in height because ceilings are so tall in that old building. When writer's block struck, you could spend a long time looking straight up in the air....
One day, stuck inside a poorly written draft with no exit strategy, I went for a walk to the Library of Congress and was gratified to see an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, full of Jefferson's insertions, deletions and all the inkblots of a frustrated writer. You could almost feel him wrestling those words into existence and, by extension, the nation itself. It probably helped that he did not have Supertramp to contend with.
One moonlit night, during the Civil War, Walt Whitman was struck by the beauty of the president's house, "the White House of future poems." He had no idea that so many writers -- some of them even poets (Archibald MacLeish) -- would find employment there. Most were decidedly less illustrious: nameless prose stylists, cranking out the words by which we live, now and then stumbling on a bit of inspiration. Speechwriting has plenty of pitfalls, but in a solipsistic world that expects our writers to dish endlessly about themselves, it can be rewarding to write quietly for a larger cause. Now and then, too many cooks actually improve the broth.
Read entire article at WaPo
In 1948, James R. Masterson and Wendell Brooks Phillips published a satire of Washington writing called "Federal Prose." The verdict, as you might imagine, was not positive. Here is how they translated "too many cooks spoil the broth" into federalese: "Undue multiplicity of personnel assigned either concurrently or consecutively to a single function involves deterioration of quality in the resultant product as compared with the product of the labor of an exact sufficiency of personnel."
The more I learned about speechwriting, the more I realized that it was nothing like other forms of writing. Most literary expression is intensely personal; speechwriting is, by definition, anonymous. It is also a deeply collective enterprise, in which many people join together to say something well. The writer becomes a bit of a journalist, interviewing dozens of specialists, gathering information and then sifting it before putting pencil to paper. A rudimentary form of e-mail allowed early drafts to be circulated and then to work their way up the chain of command, with liposuction and blemish-removal performed at every stage. The sharpest editing was done at the top. Every word spoken by a president becomes the official policy of the United States, so there is no room for a lazy adjective. Or, God forbid, a mistake.
In some ways, you could not imagine a worse environment for creative output. We had pagers that functioned as cattle prods, stunning us into prolixity. Whatever words we generated were government property, and we had to leave our hard drives in our office safes. Late at night, the infinite hallways of the Old Executive Office Building resembled the hotel in "The Shining," with room after room devoted to inscrutable government functions and odd apparitions like jogging Marines (hoo-ah!). Most cubicles were tiny in width and length, but extremely generous in height because ceilings are so tall in that old building. When writer's block struck, you could spend a long time looking straight up in the air....
One day, stuck inside a poorly written draft with no exit strategy, I went for a walk to the Library of Congress and was gratified to see an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, full of Jefferson's insertions, deletions and all the inkblots of a frustrated writer. You could almost feel him wrestling those words into existence and, by extension, the nation itself. It probably helped that he did not have Supertramp to contend with.
One moonlit night, during the Civil War, Walt Whitman was struck by the beauty of the president's house, "the White House of future poems." He had no idea that so many writers -- some of them even poets (Archibald MacLeish) -- would find employment there. Most were decidedly less illustrious: nameless prose stylists, cranking out the words by which we live, now and then stumbling on a bit of inspiration. Speechwriting has plenty of pitfalls, but in a solipsistic world that expects our writers to dish endlessly about themselves, it can be rewarding to write quietly for a larger cause. Now and then, too many cooks actually improve the broth.