I’ve attended ten years of Bay Solstice and volunteered at rehearsals for a couple years, and I’ve noticed that even the songs I don’t like very much hit harder than the speeches, almost always. Great speeches are possible, but rare. And having delivered a really good one myself, and put some thought into what makes for great speeches, I think there’s some significant low-hanging fruit. Little of this advice is incredibly novel, but it’s neglected and from moderately to very tractable, so after giving a talk at LessOnline I’ve decided to write it up, as best as I can, for speakers and organizers to use for Solstices large and small.^[1]

And if it doesn’t quite make sense, or it does but you want extra eyes on a script or extra ears on a speech, contact me! For at least the next year and probably longer, anyone who contacts me will get at least 15 minutes of my time to help them out as best I can. (Here on LW works, Discord @_jisk works better, Signal jisk.75 probably works but I don’t know that I’ve ever had someone try to blind message me there.)

Why Listen to Me?

I have a 100% hit rate on writing and delivering Solstice speeches. Sample size of one each, but, you know, the headline number sure is impressive. I’ve also run smaller events, some trying to do holiday/ritual and some just ordinary recurring meetups, plus volunteered for running the slides for two years of Solstice and given script/pacing feedback to the organizers. And I’ve been thinking about the general topic of what makes holidays and rituals and their components work on and off for quite a while now.

On the other hand, sample size of one is still sample size of one. I know I have strong opinions on aspects of Solstice music other people do not share, which may affect the usefulness of my advice. (I think not, mostly because perfectionism is the main thread of those opinions and it’s productive here, but I try to have some epistemic humility when I know I’m in a small minority by values.)

I am not at all sure this is the right advice for a different audience - I expect anyone like rationalists will share a lot of applicability, and maybe more generally, but I’m not sure. And while I think there’s a range beyond Solstice where speeches aimed for emotional impact and conveying a message to an audience is useful, I know it’s not fully general - particularly, little of the advice here is particularly viable for the typical highly-personal highly-painful Speech of Darkness.

Some of it is also optimized for speeches of the length I'm familiar with at Bay Solstice; I've heard from others that Boston Solstice and others like it typically have significantly shorter speeches, few reaching the length of a song. I'll try to note expected differences there but they'll be untested.

Also, a warning: this advice is not an asymmetric weapon. A speech’s emotional impact and persuasive impact is largely unaffected by truth value; ‘truthiness’ is just as good as truth and often better, though blatant nonsense will work less well. Be careful in the use of any emotional persuasion, which speeches, songs, and rituals universally are; you are on a certain level going around with two subcritical uranium hemispheres in your pocket and hoping they don’t click together, form a supercritical mass, and kill you with radiation. And you, and the audience you have affected, might not even notice anything has gone wrong.

High Level

There’s four parts to a speech. You get the raw material, by writing it or finding it. You edit it into a speech form rather than an essay or blog post. You practice it. And then you perform it. We’ll look a little at each. But first, the one most important thing to remember:

Practice the speech. Practice it a slightly unreasonable amount. As much as seems needed, and then a little more. 20%, 30% more than you needed to get it in your head.

I’ll go into more detail later but I’m very convinced this is the lowest-hanging, highest-impact fruit to be picked in terms of making mediocre speeches good and good speeches great.

Get a Speech

The first thing you need to give a great speech, obviously, is a speech. There's two ways to do this: find something (usually written) and turn it into a speech, or write your own. Your priorities are largely the same, but your approach is different. Your priorities are looking for what makes something a good Solstice speech:

• First that there’s a strong emotional message. It’s unlikely that the speech will convey more emotion in the audience than it does in the speaker; I’ll never say never here but you’ve probably got to have more charisma than you know what to do with.
• Second, that it's a message that resonates with the speaker. This is easier if you do the searching or writing yourself, but if you have a close friend you can predict, who you think can be persuaded to give a speech, guessing what they care about may work.
• Last, that this message is appropriate for Solstice; that it’s true, that it fits into the classic Dusk-Night-Dawn arc somewhere, that it doesn’t rest on assumptions like spirituality, shrimp suffering, or 'authentic relating' that large portions of the audience will likely not share.

Find a Speech

Reading old Solstice programs and their contents - speeches, mostly, but also songs, reading lyrics or listening - may help with developing good taste for what works. Reading speeches from other formats to get a sense of what works as a speech may help as well. The classic study program of modern oratory is reading and listening to MLK, and for getting a sense for a written piece that would make good oratory adapted, you’d want to start with Letter from Birmingham Jail, which was, obviously, not delivered as a speech, and yet written by a master orator.

But developing and conveying taste is hard, and it’s mostly elaboration on the basic emotional impact. I'm gesturing in the direction of things you can do to improve if you're out of ideas, not giving you a study program, because I don't have one and don't know how to create one.

Write a Speech

That sounded hard, so perhaps you would rather write your raw material yourself. This requires more skill, but if you have it, less luck and less time. It’s not quite like writing a nonfiction informational blog post, nor quite like writing fiction, though I think you want at least a modest amount of practice with both if possible. Again, you want a core emotional message, and the requirements are the same, but here you’re looking for one you feel yourself, inspired by something you read or heard or said in a conversation with a friend or etc., and looking to build that up into a speech instead of cutting down an essay into a speech. If you’re better - or more experienced, at least - at writing persuasive essays than writing speeches, you may want to write it up into a longish form suitable for an essay first, maybe even publish that online, and then cut it down to a speech later.

Writing your own speech will mostly be expanding outward from a core. You know the big emotional line you want to hit, and naively you might just build up to that quickly, hit it, and stop. But while Bay Solstice has experimented with very short speeches - Nihil Supernum, The Orange - you mostly want something significantly longer; three minutes or five, maybe seven if it’s really good. You probably want to return to the main point at least once after the first time, maybe twice or even three times, and you need other related thoughts, framing, space to breathe. So you’ll want to find one or two related thoughts that lead into your main message, that you can detour through before coming back to it.

(This is not the only way. You can also have two main messages that feel connected to you, and first hit one and then bridge into the other. This works particularly well at bridge points in the Solstice program where you’re transitioning from Dusk to Night or Night to Dawn, if you can pull it off. Pulling it off is significantly harder, though, and I wouldn’t recommend trying that as your first attempt. Also I haven't done it myself and so have less advice.)

Edit the Speech

Marble sculpture is a good metaphor for editing an essay into a speech. You’re looking for the core art, message, emotion within the raw material and trying to cut that away to reveal it. Particularly among a community of fast readers, essays tolerate a lot more elaboration, setup, and teardown than speeches, and that’s a lot of what you want to remove. Particularly, you want little to no falling action after the climax, keeping the peak at the end. To do otherwise risks ‘cutting away from the punch’ ^[2] and swerving the audience away from the message before it has time to sink in and hit them. This is also present after each particularly impactful line; give it space.

In fact, literally give it space!

In your edited copy of your script, probably in Google Docs, literally add blank lines before and after. The more time you want the audience to have to think about it, the more space. (Exactly how much time you want will often be discovered as you practice.) Even for less crucial lines you’ll often want to add more physical space on the page; as a reader you can insert the appropriate gaps in your inner narration, but as a listener the speaker must do it for you, and so as an editor you really ought to add the line breaks and whitespace to create reminders. (Even if the one you’re reminding is yourself; me in two weeks is a stranger just as much as my friend I’m sitting next to right now.)

As we discussed while considering writing, you’ll want several strong emotional beats, most of which return to the central theme and message of the speech and some of which may not, going somewhere else to allow a return to the theme later. These need their space and they need their emphasis; you’ll want to reword sentences and rearrange paragraphs to make the cadence of your words hit harder. This is also a skill, and again, reading and listening to oratory is a good way to try to learn good taste in that skill. I can also recommend poetry - mostly not modern poetry, but slightly older poetry designed to be recited. Kipling is the master of this, in my experience, though I’ve also found the speeches and songs in The Lord of the Rings to be excellent examples - my personal favorites are Theoden’s ‘spear shall be shaken’ speech, though it's very short, and Gimli’s song of Durin You don’t, usually, want to be making poetry, here, but poetry/prose is not a binary and you want to be significantly more toward poetry than a factual essay like one of Zvi’s AI posts.

Also there’s some practical concerns, mostly length. For Bay Solstice, I believe speeches are usually between four and six minutes, not counting the very short intros and outros the organizer/host puts in to set things up. (I mostly don't think of those intros as 'speeches', per se. They are not the kind of thing that aspires to greatness and are reliably good.) I have heard that other Solstices have norms more like two and half to three and a half. For comparison, 500 Million But Not a Single One More lands, for my test run, around four and a half, and takes up a page and a half in Google Docs.^[3] You can stretch this top end for something really good - 500 Million is, so even at shorter-speech Solstices it makes the cut, but might not if it was more than five minutes. For the Bay, I think that upper limit is around seven minutes; Goddess of Everything Else was adapted in 2018 and IIRC it was, while quite good, still long enough that it dragged. (It takes up three and a half pages of Docs, not counting the scriptlike format.)

Too short is also a possibility, but one you're unlikely to run into. Editing a written piece down for speech is hard, and overshooting is uncommon. Much more common is cutting down everything that seems like it can be spared and finding that it's still too long, and then struggling to find further edits which are only slightly painful, removing pieces which are good but not crucial, to get it down to the upper limits while leaving all the very best parts in the final result. Just in case you do overshoot, keep a copy of the unedited text, and save versions if you can, but you likely won't need them.

Practice the Speech

The core insight here is to adopt theatrical techniques. “Practice more” is perhaps the most obvious possible advice, and to a large extent I’m just reminding you, my audience, that your audience will appreciate it if you take it. But giving an explanation of why and how may make that easier to remember and more appealing.

So there’s three things that probably everyone practicing a speech for this or any other purpose has noticed you get from practice, and a fourth you may not have. You want to learn the words, obviously, and find, in speaking the words, where there are pieces that trip you up, and also find the natural rhythm and delivery of them. These will often mean you go back to editing, in smaller quantities, marking up your printout if not going back for a fresh one. But the fourth one, while not quite distinct from the first, is to get off-book.

To be on-book or off-book is a term from acting. When you begin learning a script, you are on-book, and rehearsals for a show of any kind start as a “read-through” where everyone has a copy of the script and goes through speaking their lines when they come up, responding to others, and no one has anything memorized. They are reading from the ‘book.’ In modern practice, theater and screen actors get fully off-book, memorizing everything of their lines and most of the scenes they appear in, needing no reference to the script by the time they get to the performance itself. This takes quite a lot of work and I do not recommend you try it for a speech. I put a moderately insane amount of practice into my speech in 2017 and I still was only about 99% off-book; it would certainly not have been worth trying for 100%.

However, in my experience Solstice speakers in the Bay are usually only about 80% off-book: they need to refer to their script about once every five lines or sentences. And there is a very good historical example of a better target: traditional Shakespearean theater, such as you can experience at the modern Globe Theatre in London, was only about 95% off-book; every twenty lines or so, an actor needed to call ‘Line!’ or start to trail off, upon which a young man backstage, who had the full script and was reading along, would prompt them with the next few words, which is almost always enough to get going and jog their memory back to the imperfectly-memorized script. This is a much easier standard to aspire to, and we know from history that it works very well. Perfectly? Optimally? No, with the time and energy to devote yourself to a single play instead of five simultaneously^[4] it’s clearly better to get it perfect. But a Solstice is not a job, even if for the organizer it can be about as much work as one, and you ain’t got time for that. You do, however, have time to reach an Elizabethan actor’s level of competence. Refer to your script only every twenty lines or so; 20:1 is much, much better than 4:1.

Why? Well, it works for actors: argument from outside view. But in specific: if you’re stuck to your script, you’re stuck to your podium and your hands always have to be free to pick it up or stick a finger on the page to find the next word. That means you can’t move, and you can’t gesture, and especially in a big room, your ability to emote is restrained way more than you think by that. Your gaze can’t swing across the room if you need to interrupt it to look down. Reading off a script is, in short, a fundamentally unnatural way of speaking, and that makes it less effective. Better to get your flow as uninterrupted as possible, so that you can speak with a cadence that conveys your emotion and confidence.

Other Modes of Practice

For my own practice, I pretty much exclusively relied on reading it aloud, paying attention to my own words and cadence as I spoke them. For people who hear text in their head as they read silently, that can stand in for a significant amount of practice; you may be able to get 90% off-book without it, and if you prefer that, go ahead. (For people who don't hear words in their head while reading I expect it is completely useless, which is unlikely to be a surprise.) I expect it's something like 80% as effective as reading aloud, if it works for you at all, and could be much more than 25% more convenient. I do expect this has a lower ceiling, so you'll want to at least mix in practice aloud and probably switch to that entirely later on, but it is for most people helpful.

In the other direction, rather than listen to your words at the same time as you speak, consider recording your speech and listening to it later. I think this is probably slightly less good at getting off-book and slightly to significantly better at catching awkward phrasing or delivery. Some people also find it difficult to listen to both their delivery and their words at the same time, in which case it's better at both sides of that and highly recommended. It takes about twice as long and is harder to arrange, but trying it a couple times, especially if you don't have anyone willing to act as a test audience for you with external ears, seems worth trying for many people, maybe most. Next time I do a speech I will definitely try this and get a more informed opinion about where it's most helpful. The only warning I'll give is that you don't want to mess with the speed even if you usually listen to podcasts at 5x speedup.

An Unreasonable Amount

How much is a reasonable amount of practice and a slightly unreasonable one depends on speech length. For very short 'speeches' like the one or two paragraph organizer intros or outros that splice together songs and larger speeches, one read through and a full rehearsal will often be more than enough. Shorter speeches take less practice; I think it's superlinear scaling but not by a lot, something like x^1.5. My experience is with speeches targeting about five minutes, around two pages, and I'll focus on that for the numbers I'm giving here, but I'll try to flag my guesses for shorter speeches.

For a five-minute speech, I think you start at two practices for reasonable certainty of an okay result, four for a promise of good. You might do better, with luck, talent, or some other advantage, but you can rely on getting at least that good.^[5] Six to eight practices is getting you toward great. Generalizing to shorter speeches, I think a one-page three-minute speech needs at least one practice session for okay, two for good, three or four to try for great.

When I say I once put a moderately insane amount of practice in, I mean I practiced a three-and-a-half page, six minute speech twenty to thirty times over two months. There were diminishing returns, and the returns for those last dozen practice runs were pretty small. But they were nonzero. I went past the point where I could notice improvements from each run; this is the point where I say it got insane.^[6] If you want to give, not just a great speech, but possibly the best ever speech at a Solstice, well, "Practice makes perfect; obsession makes better"; go ahead and try. But otherwise stay sane; feel no need or duty to keep going once you stop noticing improvements, even if you want a great speech, and if you got a few practices but you ran out of time before you stopped improved, you have not failed.

If you're working on a shorter speech, the number of reps required changes, but that rule of thumb stays. I'm told three practices to run out of noticeable improvements for a two to three minute speech is likely, and this makes a fair amount of sense to me so it's probably correct. There's fewer moving parts that interact with other pieces of the speech and so there are less things that need to get a dose of attention like "is this setting up for that well?", so you genuinely need to repeat it less, not just spend less time practicing.

For the Speech of Darkness, this technically all applies. But while I can’t make universal generalizations, I'd expect the amount of practice suggested here to be highly uncomfortable for those, if not painful. Practice would still help improve, but the tradeoffs are way heavier and I expect the cost-benefit analysis cuts against large amounts of practice.

Some advice on this for organizers: the spacing out is helpful, as is reminding people to start earlier. If you run a Solstice large enough to delegate a music coordinator, strongly consider delegating a speaker coordinator who can herd cats, organize some early rehearsals (a month or so in advance) where they speak to each other as their audience, see if anyone isn’t up to it and needs to be replaced. Leave yourself running artistic direction and logistics, planning your own bridging mini-speeches, and helping out your coordinators when they need support, and whatever one-offs come up; this is still plenty of work for you. And it should encourage your speakers to improve with the least needed work for them and, collectively, for you and your coordinators.

Perform the Speech

This is both the hardest part and easiest. You know what you need to do. I suggest printing a clean copy even if you don’t have many changes and won’t need to refer to it much - not much is not zero. You should have at least one run in front of a small audience at a rehearsal, which should help some with confidence in front of an audience, which is the really difficult part.

One thing I can’t say, unfortunately, is that following this advice will give you way more compliments. You will get them anyway and the difference isn’t that big. If you haven’t done this a lot you probably won’t notice the difference. (I can say, though, that you will notice the difference yourself, and this will probably help with confidence.) So, go ahead - do the thing, say the words, enjoy the rest of the event, and collect the compliments.

As with anything else, doing a postmortem on how it went, within the next day, or ideally next few hours, will likely make you better at it for the future. I don’t have advice for this, and haven’t tried it myself. Honestly it seems like the timing is going to usually be unfavorable for it. Most likely it’s not worthwhile. But if you really want to go for excellence at all costs… well, here’s a cost. I'm pretty sure it will help.

In Conclusion

• Practice as much as seems needed to learn the speech, and then some more past that.
• Know what the core message of the speech is, and write and/or edit it to emphasize it
• If you want extra eyes or ears, which may even be better at this than you, contact me and I'll see what I can do to edit or help you with your delivery.︎

1. ^{^}

   Very small solstice organizers (around a dozen or less) will find less to use. Also, some advice assumes that an ordinary speech is in the five minute range, which is true at Bay Solstice (I think) but seems to be rather long for others.

2. ^{^}

   From an interview with Jackie Chan talking about the difference between martial arts filmography in Hong Kong vs. Hollywood - Hollywood rarely shows you the physical impact of a blow, while Hong Kong always does, and often zooms in on it to show the hit as hard as possible. Viewers frequently feel the mental ghost of the impact themselves in the Hong Kong version, but much less in the Hollywood version.

3. ^{^}

   Actually five but that was because I haven't practiced it enough not to get choked up a half-dozen times and stumble over my words.

4. ^{^}

   Yes, that’s what the King’s Men would have done. Being an actor in those days was kinda insane.

5. ^{^}

   Unless the practice just isn't helping. You'll notice this quickly, if it's true. Vary the practice, and if it still isn't helping... Then probably you just have to hand off the speech to someone else. Sorry.

6. ^{^}

   I was at this time a bit insane myself. I doubt putting this much effort in was healthy; I certainly wasn't.