The Passionate Speaker
by Mike Landrum
Inaugural Issue - Dec 2000 -
"Tell me a story!" my six-year-old daughter asks me. It’s bedtime but she doesn’t want to listen to that hard fact. She wants to hear a story. We humans love a good story. That was the thing language was developed to do. Each of us has a story to tell – at least one, and often many. It is our stories that let us understand ourselves, each other and the world.
As speakers, it is difficult, perhaps impossible to arouse passion, or even interest without a story. The Ten Commandments would be just another dry list of authoritarian abstractions if it weren’t for the story behind them. Now that I think of it, every great religion has succeeded because of the stories they had to tell. Stories that made people convert and conquer and sacrifice themselves. That was Joseph Campbell’s point in his great work, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Our myths define us and give us a point of reference in this uncertain life.
I heard a speaker recently who wanted to inspire his audience toward greater creativity. His energy and passion were palpable and his commitment to his mission was total. “Let your ideas soar!” he implored. “Trust your heart, your intuition, your higher self!” He went on in this vein for awhile, grand words and phrases echoing like thunder in his speech – and we in the audience sat unmoved. Then he told about Gandhi marching to the sea to make salt with the peasants of India. There he had a story. We listeners perked up because now his words took on a specific and understandable concreteness.
I do not mean to say that your speech should be nothing but stories. That might leave your audience wishing, along with Shakespeare, for “More matter and less art.” Certainly the ‘matter’ matters. But our situation is rather like that of the dramatist in Samuel Johnson’s couplet:
The drama’s laws,
The drama’s patrons give.
For we that live to please
Must please to live.
Give your patrons the pleasure they deserve. Audiences are all wishing for a story. Give them one and they will follow you into almost any argument you care to put forward. You could even persuade a child to sleep.
©2000 Michael F. Landrum
Thank you for reading this issue of The Passionate Speaker
Mike Landrum is an actor, writer and speaker living in the Hudson Valley of New York. This reprise of his e-zine from the first days of this century will appear on SS regularly with some editing and additional material as deemed necessary by the passage of time. We hope to welcome some of the early subscribers as well as new friends, and hope for your feedback.
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