Brand New Speeches

It's exciting. You've been to the library a thousand times, you've found a book that smells like a potential interp, you've cut the thing and printed it out, or you've selected your platform topic, written the thing and printed it out, and now what do you have in your hands?

Nothing. So you walk over the printer and pull out the pieces of paper with the fresh ink and now what do you have in your hands?
And brand new speech.

Just like that. Whoa. That was cool.

It's exciting! I get excited just thinking about it. Next year is upon us, and that means lots of new speeches for lots of people. Just today I was editing one, and just last Monday I was reading several for parents and coaches. Did I mention this is exciting? I know I'm easily excited, but seriously, it is.

It's fun looking for speeches, and it's fun cutting them, but it's also kind of frustrating some times. You know that moment when you've looked virtually everywhere and can't find any interesting piece, or any topic that seems to fit you? Or when you're past that stage and you're not sure how you can get your speech to be less than 12 minutes? I've been there many, many, a lot of times. But it's cool because you're past there now. Hypothetically. Because now you have a speech, and that's the best! You get to practice with characters, you know, different voices, postures, mannerisms, all that interp-nerd stuff. And blocking. Blocking is great. I recently worked out a pretty sweet sword fight scene in my duo for this year. At least, that's the goal. It will be sweet someday, we hope. And I have to practice holding different kinds of guns for another speech, as well as falling in a pit, riding trains, and possibly a horse. It's fun! Or you get to work with gestures, what you want to emphasize, brainstorm ideas for your boards, and make sure your argument is really clear in all those great platforms you're planning. Of course, the really fun stage is coming soon: memorization! Yea, I know, memorization is not that fun. I mean, being off-book is definitely a great feeling, but the process of getting there can be tedious. Still, having new speeches is great.

Why? Well, besides the technical stuff we covered, brand new speeches are fun because you hope great things will happen. Right? You have a new speech. You're set. You can only go up from here. Isn't it exciting?

Someday, speechranks 2012-2013 will be filled with speech entries. And that won't be for a few months, so lots of those speeches will be kind of oldish and memorized and blocked and cut and stuff. But right now it looks something like this:

Because the speeches we have are so new that speechranks hasn't even heard of them. And probably no one else has either.

You're homeschooled. You new that.