While feeling nervous before a speech to some extent is a
good thing - it will give you an adrenaline rush and keep
your blood pumping.

If you feel your nerves getting out of hand, here are two
great tips to help relax you and put you in a state to
deliver a fantastic speech.

1. Visualisation

This is best done before you go to sleep and as you wake up
in the mornings. At those "half-asleep" times your brain
waves will allow your visualisations to powerfully
re-program your subconcious. In the days running up to
your speech or presentation, close your eyes and see
yourself in your mind's eye, at the podium. Picture
yourself as you would like the presentaion to go. See
yourself looking relaxed and happy and totally at ease.
Run through your speech.

Make your vision as bright and vivid as You can. The more
vivid and colourful the image, the more your subconcious
will believe the image to be "true" and will make your
vision come about in real life. (Top athletes use this
technique in the run up to an important sports event). So
take some time to create a full image, see the venue, the
stage, the audience.

Bring sound into your vision - hear yourself talking
clearly and articulately. See your audience responding
well to your speech, listening closely. Hear the audience
clapping and see them smiling and happy in response to your
speech.

This technique really works, and if you visualise several
times a day in the run up to your speech, you will feel
much more prepared and therefore relaxed.

2. Affirmations

Affirmations are strong, positive statements that you say
to yourself over and over again until all negative feelings
like fear and stress disappear and relaxation takes over
your body. This is very powerful technique that can
quickly change your mental state. Luckily it can be done
anytime, anywhere. Again, try these affirmations in the
days running up to your speech.

Choose a positive statement, such as "I am well-known for
my powerful and insightful speeches". Repeat this to
yourself ten times and see how you feel afterwards. Some
people like to say them out loud in front of a mirror.

The amazing thing abaout affirmations is that you don't
even have to believe the statement for it to have a
positive effect. And the truth is that if you say
affirmations often enough you will eventually start to
believe them anyway!

Use these two tips on public speaking in the days before
your speech and I guarantee you will feel more relaxed and
ready to deliver a great presentation than ever.

Reading your speech makes it difficult to deliver your
speech an interesting and confident way. You are tied to
one spot by the speech and it is difficult to connect with
the audience.

There are 4 circumstances when you may want to read your
speech:

1) Political speech - where each word and phrase is to be
scrutinized.

2) Technical speech - difficult concepts are being
explained and accuracy is important

3) A special event - a certain theme is being portrayed

4) Confidence - where the speaker does not feel confident
enough to deliver it without a written speech.

Public speaking is about effectively conveying ideas to the
audience. Reading a speech makes that difficult because it
confines the ability to speak expressively. Some of the
shortcomings caused by reading are;

1) It delivered in a monotonous drone

2) Eyes are kept down reading the script

3) Long sentences and words are used that are difficult to
understand for the listener

4) Little visual appeal - i.e. the speaker does not move or
gesture.

To overcome these difficulties and speak with confidence
the following techniques will help when reading your speech

Speech preparation - write your own speech. It will help
you to know what is in the speech and it will be personal
to you. After you have written your speech, go over it
again looking for words and phrases that do not sound right
when spoken. Spoken language is simpler than written
language. Written language can be hard to understand when
it is spoken. Keep the words and sentences short, to aid
the audience's understanding. If you haven't written the
speech go over it and modify it for your style and your own
stories, i.e. personalizing it. Type the speech so that it
is easy for you to read aloud. Double spaced typing and on
one side normally works best. Also ensure you keep your
pages in order so you do not have to shuffle through them
to find the next sheet when delivering your speech.

Practice your speech as often as you can. In most
circumstances you are trying to achieve a conversational
quality to your speech. You will probably discover phrases
and words that require changing. Your practice should
cover:-

1) Looking up from your speech. If you are constantly
looking down you will not be able to connect with the
audience. You want to familiar enough with the speech so
you only need to glance down to see what comes next and can
look out at the audience when you deliver the line.

2) Bring in gestures into your delivery. Gestures add
visual appeal to your speech and thereby interest to the
proceedings for the audience

3) Use your voice expressively. Keep up a good pace and
vary the tone and pitch as you would in normal
conversation. Your voice should be expressing the ideas and
feelings that are being spoken.

4) Practice in front of a mirror or video yourself, so you
can observe yourself and make improvements. Ask your
friends and family to play your audience and feedback their
observations to you.

Reading your speech makes it difficult to speak with
confidence and to effectively convey your ideas. But it is
not impossible. By carefully preparing and thoroughly
practicing you can improve the delivery of the speech and
make it more interesting and effective for you and your
audience.

Humans read everything they can find around them, and for
most people, fiction is the more pleasing of those many
choices. Clearly, they like what they read because
humanity's great literary works and their ideas have guided
our lives for centuries.

I began writing stories when I was eight. Back then, I was
barely able to make complete sentences, and the spelling
was just as dislocated; still even then, I knew researching
and writing would become my life passion.

Think about what you read for a moment.

It's quite likely that some of the fiction you are reading
today will eventually be classified among the greatest
literary work of our time. I admit that I have no idea how
those particular works will be treated as time moves
forward around us all.

As a published novelist, I've contemplated the necessary
literary elements for creating just such an impactful and
hopefully lasting story. As I worked to identify those
concepts, I was more than a little surprised at how they
were so interconnected with story creation.

By sharing these ideas with you today, I'm betting I can
make your fiction reading experience a lot more enjoyable.

There seems to be seven qualities that exist or should have
existed in all the WOW stories I've read or seen on the big
screen. As I worked with this, I changed the concept name
of a WOW story into the term dynamite fiction, which I
still use.

We all know that when reading fiction, you enjoy some
stories much more than others. That was my starting point
for figuring out this puzzle. As a writer, I wanted to know
why that happened.

What were those qualities that left you with such wonderful
feelings about a satisfying story?

Readers often use terms like powerful or gripping to
describe a story that leaves them with a nice yet elusive
feeling— that quality of a story that makes you simply
want to shout WOW. Those stories fill us up in some sort of
hard to describe way and make us wish we could live inside
it for a little while longer.

Every story is filled with actors who do their level best
to tell you their part of a particular story. To do that,
they use conflict and confrontation& #8212;at times small,
simple, and funny, at other times enormous, complicated,
and deadly. When being entertained, we usually enjoy them
both, yet few realize these actors also present us with
various life altering metaphors.

Dynamite fiction is about deeply stimulating your
imagination. Its characters are a primary vehicle for doing
that. When you just finish reading a stinker of a story,
what's the first thought you have about it? Those
characters just had no energy or life, right? They were
flat and awkward and confusing, and that didn't make you
like them, did it?

Besides characters, another aspect of story must also
engage your imagination at the highest possible level. The
plot and subplots of a story are the biggest single reason
it's being created. If a writer doesn't absolutely love the
story that's being written, then there's little chance you
will either, and it will probably not WOW you.

You know the feelings you get when a story satisfies you in
all those little ways. You're enjoying what's happening
because it's keeping a smile on your face or has you
hanging onto the edge of your seat. Your satisfaction is
obvious, yet when you're fully engaged like this, a much
deeper part of you is often being satisfied as well by
what's being implied and left unspoken.

The literary arts demand both craft and art from those who
seek to practice its calling. A writer's craft builds
story. A writer's art captures and teases the imagination
of readers like you. Stories failing to engage your
imagination will leave you feeling like you just wasted the
time you spent with that story.

The final quality of a dynamite fiction story pushes one of
our prior qualities to an even higher level of excellence.
Of course, characters have to be rich and details in their
overall development, and with all that, they also need
something else. A personal attraction that is so strong, a
reader slips easily into then and lives comfortably inside
the story with them. This is perhaps where readers find
their most pleasure in reading.

Not every quality needs to be present in a story for you to
enjoy it. If they are, then it will be even more enjoyable.

Here's a summary of those seven qualities of dynamite
fiction:

1. The story involves something that pleases you.
2. The actors present metaphors about living life.
3. Story's characters appear lifelike and real.
4. Nature of story plot and subplots matters a lot.
5. The story speaks to you on more than one level.
6. Your imagination will be fully engaged.
7. Characters pull you into the story with them.

These qualities of dynamite fiction are all about the
creation of visual images using words. Readers see words
and instantly translate them into images. Stories with an
abundance of images that please us are the stories that
also WOW us.