You can expound, rail and pontificate in print. But in front of a live gathering of passionate obsessives, you may well quake, writes DAVID ADAMS
I RECEIVED an invitation a few weeks back to speak at a conference in London on February 20th. Conferences are daunting places for a columnist. Frankly, there are too many awkward questions that you can’t avoid having to make a stab at answering.
In almost any other public setting, a discomfiting query can be sidestepped by nothing more than a glance at your watch and/or the sudden recollection of a prior engagement.
Even on television or radio, as any politician will surely attest, if you’re temporarily flummoxed all you need do is waffle for a short while, safe in the knowledge that the presenter must soon move on to another point. Although I should stress that this only applies to a “live” situation. In a pre-recording, the presenter can take all the time that is needed to nail you down, and then edit out the waffling before broadcasting.
Much like in a prerecorded interview, there are no easy escape routes if you’re a guest speaker at a conference. You’re captured: at the mercy of a crowd looking for answers. The problem, of course, is that most conference attendees have a deep interest in and knowledge about the subject(s) under discussion – or else they wouldn’t be there.
Actually that’s only half the problem. The other half is that usually this is a lot more than can be said for the columnist.
He’s been invited along to give his considered view after having made passing reference to their pet obsession a couple of times. However, he might merely have been bolstering other (to him) more important points that he was trying to make. Or, perish the thought, deliberately giving the impression of knowing more about something than is actually the case.
It is just possible he has as deep a knowledge of the subject at hand as those who invited him – but the odds of that are only slightly better than him winning the lottery. The columnist will undoubtedly have a good “working knowledge” – or will acquire one between accepting the invite and turning up to speak – but that’s a different thing altogether. Most of the people he’s due to address left “working knowledge” behind many years ago. His audience, remember, is a mix of the expert and the obsessive.
At best, he’ll be facing the prospect of disabusing his inviters of the notion that they have discovered someone capable of delivering a unique insight. An experience, I’ve often thought, not dissimilar to breaking the news to a child that Father Christmas doesn’t exist, except with profound personal embarrassment thrown in. At worst, he’ll be publicly gutted and hung out to dry by people who twigged a long time ago that he was chancing his arm, and have brought him along to prove it to the world.
In our defence, we columnists tend to range over lots of subjects (at least those who aspire to a readership beyond double figures do). Providing it’s not libellous, even a little exaggeration to make a point is permissible. Like a Claude Monet or a Bob Dylan of the computer keyboard, we lean heavily towards thematic expression: broad-brush, “big picture” stuff. In many respects, fine detail is anathema to us. It clouds the longer, broader vision that we have and want to impart.
At a conference, the detail (along with the devil) resides almost entirely with the audience – as will be made painfully clear to the guest speaker who earns a living writing about everything under the sun.
I realise that all of this raises an obvious question. When it’s much safer pontificating in generalities and abstract allusions from a newspaper column, why then do we not just decline all public speaking invitations?
The answer is quite simple: ego.
By definition, given that he spends his time lecturing everyone else, there is a part of the columnist – a very large part – that believes he has most if not all of the answers. So whatever about past experience or the illusions of those who issued the invite, or even if they quite obviously have just publicity or retribution in mind, the columnist will troop along, convinced that he has something profound to convey, regardless of whether he knows comparatively little about the subject matter.
However, the London conference I am to speak at has presented me with a unique dilemma. Not a lack of expertise or worries about how the audience or hosts will treat me.
No, for the first time, thanks to a recent column of mine that took republicans to task for not wooing unionists enough, my role will be that of giving advice to people on how best to go about achieving something that I would rather they failed at.
The conference is hosted by Sinn Féin and entitled Putting Irish Unity on the Agenda. I'm quite looking forward to it, and will play the part as best I can. Still, it does represent yet another example of the trials and tribulations that a columnist has to face.