It's a bonus edition of the Book Club for Kids.
Hi, I'm Kitty Felde.
Last week, we discussed White House Clubhouse.
This week, we talked to the writer, Sean O'Brien.
He worked as a speechwriter to Joe Biden when he was vice president.
And we learn how Sean moved from writing for politicos to writing for kids.
We also get a backstage view of how political speech writing works.
Actually become a presidential speechwriter or a vice presidential speechwriter or any kind of political speechwriter.
So the way it all came down was I started working on Capitol Hill when my wife and I moved out here about 20 years ago.
I had been doing computer work in Chicago.
I'd always wanted to be a writer but I kind of didn't really have the drive to chase after it for magazine and newspaper work and I just kind of fell into doing computer work and it was good.
But then when we came out here to D.C., I decided to start interning on Capitol Hill.
And I was fortunate enough to be interning for a guy named Rahm Emanuel, who was my member of Congress.
I didn't really know anything about him, but now he's quite famous for being really sarcastic and outspoken, and so am I, So it was actually kind of a good mix.
I was the guy at the front desk arranging tours and things, but it turned out that I actually linked up well with him in terms of writing one-minute speeches to go down on the House floor.
The more senior staff were very happy to have me take on that role because he was burning them out.
And so, starting from there, every other job that I had on the Hill, moving up to being a chief of staff for Mike Quigley, was always, you know, speech writing was a big part of it.
So then later I ended up looking for work within the Obama administration, and I ended up meeting up with a guy named Jeff Nussbaum over at West Wing Writers just to ask him for help having coffee.
Coffee is a big thing when you're looking for a job.
But in this case it turns out he actually had a problem, which was that he was writing a comedy routine for Leon Panetta at the time.
And he saw an article about me doing comedy.
I used to do comedy back in Chicago.
I was in Second City and a few other things.
So he asked me to help him write some routines, and those jokes came up well.
Panetta liked them.
And so then, years later, Nussbaum remembered me when it was time to send over some resumes to the vice president's office.
From there when it was time to actually go for the job.
What I did was I read a whole lot of Biden speeches and I really just kind of tried to capture the way he spoke and what he would do.
And I ended up kind of winning the job that way.
So that was the big break.
After that, I have written for a lot of others.
I worked at the Pentagon for both Secretary of Defense and Secretary of Navy.
And I do private work now.
And but it all kind of came from.
Not just, you know, knowing a lot about speech writing because I didn't.
I learned it on the fly, but it was more about like, OK, I have a job to do.
How am I going to get it done?
And then after the fact, trying to assign some logic to is there a way that I can do that better next time?
Well, why a transition to writing for kids?
Generally, speechwriters go on to do television shows, showrunner stuff.
Why kids lit?
It really was largely because I had kids at the time.
I always wanted to be a fiction writer, but I didn't necessarily think it would be kids' fiction.
It was what I was reading a lot at the time.
I wasn't really doing my own pleasure reading, but I would either be doing research, reading for work, whatever speech i was working on, and then my break from that would be uh, you know, the kids were little enough back then that i would be reading to them at bedtime.
So i kind of get into a lot of the sort of you know.
What i now know is called middle grade fiction.
I didn't even know the term Back then.
So when we started writing and I say we because you know, like the kids and I, we were trading back and forth ideas
They would take a look at my drafts. say, where's the next chapter, Daddy?
You know, it just kind of naturally fell into what is now kind of looks like a fifth, sixth grade level book.
I am actually really happy to have had that chance to go into a little bit of a a side thing, because I got a lot of friends who have written books about their time in the White House or their political perspectives and all that.
I think that's wonderful, but it's actually really nice for me to have gone a different direction.
Well, what's the difference?
I mean, talk about writing for speeches for politicos versus writing for children.
Yeah, writing for children is a lot more timeless, which is an odd thing to say, because children themselves are not timeless.
A kid who was reading fifth grade level books when my first book came out is probably not interested in the third book when it comes out next year.
But as a general group, though, kids are always the same.
The kids that I talk to in schools, they're exactly like I was.
That stuff, especially when you take a long view of history and all of that.
That ages a lot better than writing about current events.
Even a political or current event book is out of date, any of them.
They're always out of date by the time they get published, just because things move so fast.
You know, there was a yard sale on Capitol Hill a couple of weeks ago and books everywhere.
And it was kind of stunning to me how like, oh yeah, that would have been an interesting book to read a couple of years ago, but now it's.
You know, The phrase that we used in the Pentagon was OBE, overtaken by events.
And so what's nice is that the kids' books really don't get OBE.
Some of them do get stale.
Some of them feel dated.
I'm sure mine will.
But by and large, the same sort of things.
If you have strong characters who get put into strong situations that they have to work their way out of, then that stuff lasts forever.
Well, is there a difference, though, in the discipline of the writing of it?
I mean, just in terms of technically.
Talk about the difference between the two.
And did you have to keep reminding yourself wait a minute, wait a minute.
The audience is different.
My editor reminded me, that's for sure.
My first book, my first draft.
Rather, one of the key things that the editor was saying is like you're not writing a speech.
And, you know, part of it was like my characters themselves would fall into speeches.
And part of that was, you know say, Roosevelt or even Alice appear in the story, and I wanted to use their own words.
And I did to a large extent.
But I would be having them build into kind of like a full speech in the middle of dialogue and that doesn't work.
But what I did learn was kind of how to sort of chop those things in and make them fit.
There is an overlap in that I think good speech writing and I teach a speech writing class at Georgetown.
We have a whole week on stories.
I think a good speech should be good. story.
Not every speech is that way.
For example JFK, Martin Luther King, two of the best speakers ever.
Neither of them use stories in their speeches.
But By and large a lot of the best speeches you'll have out there will either start out with a story that kind of puts you into place, gets your attention, establishes a problem, Or maybe a story in the middle that kind of keeps things moving along.
Or very often, there's a story at the end that's basically like okay, I've talked about everything I'm going to talk about, but I need a clincher.
What is this all really mean?
And you know they'll start up with some grown-up version of once upon a time which would be like so you know, it just goes to show you, or you know.
This all reminds me the first time i was in Des Moines.
If you want to see a great example of all three of those techniques, look at Oprah Winfrey's Golden Globes Award Acceptance Speech 2016.
Very, very powerful speech in the middle of the Me Too movement that really kind of added some fuel there to it.
So it was timely, it was well done, but also it happens to be full of stories.
So that's where I kind of naturally...
I was Joe Biden's speechwriter.
That guy loves telling stories.
So I think it might have been a little bit of a tougher transition, to be honest, if I was coming from someone who is more technical and policy disciplined, like Barack Obama, for example.
I wrote jokes for him, but I never wrote a speech for him.
And I think...
Being able to dive in on taking the stories of Biden's grandparents in Ireland or Biden's experience in visiting someone in Israel or something like that.
That ended up really kind of helping me in terms of how to move things along from the story for kids.
Give us a good joke that you wrote for Barack Obama.
Well, all right.
So it's going to take it political here, but in the White House Correspondents Dinner There's always this thing every year like every speechwriter who has the email address of the guy who's pulling together or sometimes the woman who's pulling together the remarks they start throwing in all the jokes that they can.
And I was no different.
I would throw in 30 jokes a year.
But one of the ones that got used from mine is Obama saying that you know, There are some things that Donald Trump would do better than me.
For example, closing Guantanamo Bay, because if there's anybody who knows about running waterfront properties into the ground, it's Donald Trump.
And so that got both a laugh and a groaner.
And I was like, OK.
The little Chicago improviser in me was really kind of touched by that.
That was good.
So I wrote that.
And then the one other thing I wrote for Obama, on the completely opposite end of the seriousness extreme, which is I helped write his eulogy of Beau Biden.
And I was pulling kind of from my knowledge of Biden's own autobiographies talking about there's something called the Biden role.
That, like, if you have to ask, it's already too late.
And so I had submitted kind of a little section for the Obama eulogy on that where – and he kind of riffed off of that.
He says, you know, we are honorary Bidens.
We follow the Biden rule.
And, you know, if you have to ask, it's too late, so we're here.
And that touched him to the point where then, in Biden's second autobiography, he actually referenced that quote as the one that he remembered from the eulogy.
So it was really kind of an odd circular type of moment.
But these are the things you end up with.
You know that can be gratifying from speech writing to be able to do that.
Thanks, Sean.
We have interviews with dozens of other writers at our website, bookclubforkidsorg.
On our Writers on Writing page.
I'm Kitty Felde.
Thanks so much for listening.
