It is still a little painful for me to remember standing in front of an auditorium packed with J. Walter Thompson people, staring down at my notes, and reading them line by line. The audience had no idea that I was petrified to be up there.
I finally learned how to overcome my deep fear of public speaking, and I learned it the hard way. I was one of five writers who spoke at a New York Times–sponsored event. I read from my latest novel, and I bombed. Big time. It was as painful as multiple wasp stings, but I learned something that changed everything about how I talk in front of a group.
Most people, especially adults, don’t want to be lectured to, and they definitely don’t want to listen to somebody staring down at pages and reading from his or her book. They want to hear stories. And, man, do I have stories to tell.
So I began telling stories whenever I had to speak in front of a crowd. My confidence rose. That’s critically important. I once asked Morgan Freeman what the key was to his acting success. “Confidence. That’s it. I know the material, and I know I’m going to deliver it well.” And he does. Very well.
A different kind of public speaking is called for when you act as a moderator. The late-night talk-show host Johnny Carson was about the best I ever saw. He let his guests talk, except when they got stuck. If that happened, Johnny stepped in and basically interviewed himself.
When President Clinton and I toured for The President Is Missing, we had a different moderator in every city. Lee Child, Paul Begala, and our lawyer Bob Barnett were great because they were smart enough to ask good questions and then get out of the way. The audience was there to listen to Clinton and, to a lesser extent, me.
On that same book tour, President Clinton told me that he’d read somewhere (he reads everything) that the attention span of humans is eight seconds. The attention span of butterflies is nine seconds. I don’t know who studies this stuff, but more power to them. I mean, who has the patience to interview butterflies?
Recently, I spoke at a big mystery writers’ conference—actually, two of them, one in Harrogate, England, the other in Dallas. I did two talks in Dallas.
The first moderator’s questions were so long and self-referential that he took up half our stage time and cut short the Q&A. The second was moderated by crackerjack mystery writer Hank Phillippi Ryan. She was just about perfect. The two of us went back and forth with humor and charm, exactly as it should be.
Interestingly, I hadn’t ever played the role of moderator until recently in south Florida. I asked questions of author Leslie Gray Streeter, and I knew my job. That was Leslie’s show, not mine. It was about Black Widow, her autobiography.
On the other hand, this is my show.