Preparing to talk

Last Sunday night I got asked to speak this Sunday, and I thought what I could do was write drafts of the talk in here, and then publish the final form, thus sharing the talk.

The problem with this is that I actually can't write a talk. I will think about it a lot, and get ideas, but when I try to write it out, it doesn't work. I guess I thought that making it a blog post would trick it. I wasn't planning on taking the written talk up there, but going through the words could have been helpful.

When I finally sat down to write, even though I was trying to basically type the words already in my head, everything still felt wrong. There were other things in my head though about the topic, which is how repentance is a gift. So I thought perhaps what I needed to do was a journal session where I covered the other issue, and that ended up going not at all how I thought it would go. I was beating myself up for something, and as soon as I started writing I felt a lot better about it, so that was something I very much needed, but still I was not writing anything really talk related.

A part of me that already knows that going up there with bookmarks for four scriptures and three keywords written down is actually the way I need to do this, and that I shouldn't fight it. If I write it out it might get too pat or too clever and polished, and my strength as a speaker is probably my urgent sincerity.

At the same time it felt like that there were things in the topic that were going to be valuable, and if I could share it, and have it out here on the internet, that could be good too.

Fortunately there is a precedent for this. About 21 years ago I also spoke on repentance, and I also went up there with very little to go on, though that time there were five scriptures. However, after the talk, a woman in the ward mentioned how she wished her son could have heard it, and so I typed it up for her, as I remembered it, and it worked out. That's what I am going to try and do for next week.

So, that's not necessarily helpful information for preparing a talk. That is the only thing that works for me, but it would not necessarily work for everyone else. I do have one tip though, which I recommend for everyone...

Don't make a big deal about not being able to avoid giving the talk, or the story of how you were called to talk, unless there is an important spiritual point to it. In this church we give talks. That's how it goes. I remember a talk once where the speaker spent more time introducing her talk than on the topic, where a metaphor about how there is no perfect way to craft a talk like there is to make cookies was clearly just a way to let people know she made good cookies.

And there would have been absolutely nothing wrong with her just telling us that. Who doesn't like cookies, or knowing where to locate good cookies? The way she did it really detracted from the talk itself though, so don't do that.