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· “I’d like to be remembered as someone who used their ability as a novelist or as a dramatist to say the things he felt needed to be said about the society” while being “as entertaining as possible,” he said in the 2006 interview. “Because if you don’t” entertain, he said, “nobody’s listening.”
This quote is included in today's obit of the prolific writer, Budd Schulberg, and I want to comment on it because he's right. Though I will add the word "interesting" and say that if you're neither entertaining nor interesting, nobody's listening.
Being "interesting" or "entertaining" are RESULTS...they are where you arrive after carefully considered preparation. It is through the act of preparing that a speaker is faced with different choices and those choices are what an audience responds to. Make the right choices and the audience is yours. Start off with a wrong one and you could be doomed from the get-go.
What makes a person interesting? It's a subjective call but you start to see that a common denominator in good talks is when speakers are unpredictable, natural, and prepared...it doesn't matter what the topic is. These are the people who can mesh knowledge of their subject with knowledge of how to prepare. They understand that the work they are responsible for happens well before they get in front of an audience; then they know to get out of their own way and trust their preparation.
In that way, they are able to arrive honestly at the desired RESULT, being entertaining. It's not something you do, but something you are once you've done the prep work. Make the right choices and the RESULTS will take care of themselves.
