Everyone loves a good dramatic speech. Whether it’s the hero taking a stand against one final act of evil or humiliation, or the villain declaring his hatred for humanity on a grand scale, or even a supporting character suddenly making their case for their very existence in a story, a speech can be a powerful moment. There’s a reason, after all, that even people who’ve never read Hamlet can quote the beginning of his most famous soliloquy—because speeches kick ass.
Which is why it’s tempting to basically make your story a series of impassioned speeches by your characters. This temptation is supported by a lot of current pop-culture, as there are several TV shows on the air right now where characters basically communicate through lengthy, impassioned speeches. The folks on these shows and in these types of stories stop on a dime and launch into eloquent, frequently well-written speeches defining their worldview, or justifying an odd life decision, or just dragging another character on the carpet for bad behavior. It can be thrilling.
It’s also very bad writing.
Bringing a Gun to a Knife Fight
Speeches are powerful because of their inherent drama; in real life people rarely make lengthy speeches aside from the boring kind made at events. If someone in real life stood up in a crowded place and made a five-minute speech about why they love you, or hate you, or why they’re about to drive into the desert and leave everything behind, it’s a powerful, unexpected moment.
Like all powerful moments, you’ve got to meter your usage of them. Building up to a powerful speech for a character over the course of chapters and thousands and thousands of words? That’s effective. Having characters pause every three pages to make a speech? That’s lazy, and every time you do so you take away some of the power of the speech. Eventually, as we see on TV, speechifying becomes so familiar it becomes the new normal, and at that point the Speech as writing technique has no power left. It’s just characters interacting in stilted, unrealistic ways.
This rule isn’t limited to speeches—any writing technique can be overused. Right now speechifying has a certain currency because it retains its power while also being overused in hit TV shows and books, so it’s tempting. But bad writing is bad writing even if it’s currently having a Moment.
On the other hand, I kind of just made a speech against speeches, didn’t I? Goddammit.
That does it. Next visit to the grocery story, I’m going to take five minutes to declare my undying love for Viva paper towels, and perform a song-and-dance routine all the way to the check out.
Or not. 😉