I seldom turn down the opportunity to speak, and more than once there’s a monetary loss for gas and even a hotel room to make those events. Civic organizations, book clubs, and groups such as retired teachers or other professional organizations all have me on their annual speakers lists, and at first I thought that was a problem, because prepared speeches aren’t my thing. I didn’t want to bore them with the same talk time after time.

Watching someone stand in front of a room, reading from a script is mind numbing. Those folks are usually nervous, or unfamiliar with public speaking and it’s obvious in the way they stand and present their talk, barely looking up from their notes or pages.

That kind of thing would be a disaster for me, and like the way I write, when I give a talk I have no idea where I’m going until I get there.

Calls came in right after my first novel released back in 2011 to come talk about The Rock Hole. Having been a classroom teacher for ten years, I knew I could stand in front of a crowd and hold their attention, because if you can keep a class full of middle school students’ interest for fifty minutes, you’re a speaker.

I disremember if that first group was Kiwanis, or Lions, or Rotary, to name a few. It was a luncheon event, though, and I stepped up to the lectern and simply followed one story or idea after the other as I recounted the disastrous road to publication I’d just endured. Folks laughed at the right places, showed concern when I told them of losing my first manuscript, and clapped with enthusiasm when the story came to full circle with a tender surprise.

Oh, wait, but first let’s Let’s start with the basics and clear something up. People often confuse lectern with rostrum, podium, and dais. Personally, I’d prefer not to stand behind any of them, because I tend to move around.

A lectern is the slant-top high desk a speaker uses to read presentation notes. I prefer not to use the term lecture, because I’m a storyteller, but to remember what you’re hiding behind in that sense, think the word “lecture.”

Sometimes large audiences require a podium, which is a raised platform that places you higher than those staring upward at you with blank, expectant faces. Hint, quickly find the friendliest face in the room. He or she might be smiling, or nodding, or changing expressions as your talk proceeds. Use them as a yardstick and an anchor if you feel as if the room is drifting away.

And then there’s the rostrum or dias, which is a larger platform, or maybe a stage, on which a head table is placed during a formal dinner. You’re usually smack in the middle of those dignitaries who invited you, and a trick is to talk to them as well as the audience in order to engage those who are sitting up there with you. Make eye contact, and they’ll appreciate you even more.

As a repeat speaker for annual events, I can’t use the exact same talk each time. Right after I started this journey, I once looked out over an audience that was strangely familiar, and then realized they were a mix of organizations I’d talked to in the past few months. I sure didn’t want to tell them the same stories, so I had to adapt and improvise, to steal from Clint Eastwood’s Sergeant Highway in Heartbreak Ridge.

That was the day I realized that audiences don’t want to be lectured, but prefer to be entertained. As authors, we can stand in front of those people (some of whom are looking at their watches) and talk about outlining, character building, and motivation. But for the most part, the members of these organizations aren’t writers, they’re a captive group who’ve been subjected to countless lectures on everything from recycling to what kind of fertilizer to use on Bermuda grass.

That’s where stories come in and we become entertainers in still another sense. I don’t have any particular ideas written down to use as notes, but I’ll talk about what comes to mind and tie it all together with something to make the audience laugh.

Like the night John Gilstrap and I went out on a Florida beach at midnight after a conference to finish off a bottle of brown water only to find the resort chained and locked that return access at some point and we had to climb over a fence to get in. And for me, that fence somehow undulated like the ocean we’d been watching as I attempted to vault over it like I was a kid. I wound up hanging halfway over it like a deer strapped to the hood of a truck.

Getting John over involved curses, grunts, groans, and threats, all of which came from him.

Or the day at another conference when Lee Child told me a shocking story about a woman who’d been faking his signature on his books until she had the opportunity to get a genuine John Henry that made her so proud she admitted to being a forger. That was a two-part story, but I only hard half because a conference official took his hand and led him away to “bend his ear” for a while and he looked back at me like a dog headed for the pound.

Or back to Gilstrap again when he and I were in a crowd of thriller and mystery writers at eight in the morning when two hookers came through the hotel lobby and asked us for directions to the ladies room. Speechless for once, John pointed, and followed by their pimps, the “ladies of the morning” wove without notice through the oblivious authors who make their living about crimes and criminals. Fascinated, John and I followed them down a hall to watch their fighting men keep a lookout as the ladies eventually emerged in their “work” clothes and the entire assemblage stepped onto an elevator and headed up.

We broke off our surveillance at that time, and went back to being observers of conference life.

Depending on the crowd before me, if they’re not writers I’ll tell stories of my childhood or life as a writer that relates to the work in progress. And it seems they always do. Just recently I talked to a civic organization about my newest contemporary western series beginning with Hard Country, and told them the real story of how we owned a ranch across the gravel road from a meth house, and how those brain-dead individuals were always breaking into the house and that I’d learned they were related to someone in the sheriff’s office who tended to look the other way.

The questions that followed were fun, quick, and interesting for me and the audience.

I included those same stories at a book club event, but talked to them, not at them, about the development of two new series, my traditional western featuring Cap Whitlatch (below), and the upcoming weird westerns that will begin with Comancheria. I was surprised to find they were more interested in the horror aspect of westerns and fielded a lot of questions after that.

I think part of that was because I tend to converse, instead of using a prepared speech or lecture.

It’s all part of being an author, and though I don’t sell a ton of books at these events, they always pay off with name recognition and recommendations to to their friends and family to read my work.

No one told me this was part of the job, but I’m having a helluva time doing it, and if you’re nervous about public speaking, just get in the car and talk to yourself aloud, following a train of thought that leads down unexpected trails. It’ll do you good in the long run.

Now, as a side note, I was discussing my first western with a civic group last week and told them The Journey South is now out, but only as an eBook. That was followed by a firehose of questions concerning electronic vs. physical books, and the publishing industry itself, that led to even more stories and fun rabbit trails that interested the audience.

With that, I’d appreciate it y’all would pass the word that there’s a new western in town, and it ain’t as traditional as you’d think.

Much obliged.