Your First Hugo Acceptance Speech

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So Richard Man just won a Hugo Award for Best Artist in Chengdu. Making him the first photographer ever to win a Hugo and the first human being ever to win a Hugo in China. Wow. Great! Kudos! Holy cow. Wanna guess his friends' reaction?

Over and over, they said: "Aren't you glad we talked you into writing an acceptance speech?"

He was and he did and he didn't read it because he knew what it said and could speak from the heart. Which proves the necessity of the speech.

I'm talking to you here, Gonnabe Writer. One day you're  going to be up for your first award and you're going to think: "No way. Not gonna happen. I'll just feel silly if I write a speech."

I've been there. My first two published stories were on the Nebula ballot. No way I could possibly win. Gardner Dozois said, "Write one anyway." So I did.

I lost.

Year after year (not every year, but close enough), I was nominated, wrote a speech, and lost. Marianne Porter,  my wife, once wonked the stats and established that I had lost more Hugos and Nebulas for fiction than anyone else. (Connie Willis, it has to be said, was nominated many more times than I was, but lost out on the loser competition by winning so many that she is winningest writer ever on the Hugo-and-Nebula front.)

Do I regret those speeches?

Only in one sense. I didn't keep them in a file. If I had, when I eventually won my Nebula, I could have stitched them together with chatty rhetoric and had a charmingly modest essay to give to a fanzine.

But here's the thing. Awards are unpredictable. I might  have won at any time. I know people who have won at their first at-bat. And if I had and if I hadn't written a speech, it would have been deer in the headlights time. You stand up there in the bright lights and a roomful of people you respect are applauding their hearts out and your mind goes blank. "Um..." you say, and you forget that your editor and your agent are expecting a shout-out. So you say something stupid that will make you cringe for the rest of your life.

Don't do that.

Write the speech.

End of lecture. Go thou and sin no more.

Above: Richard Man's actual Hugo. Gotta say it's pretty cool.

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