Updated
To write your own sound bites, set a timer for five to seven minutes and draft five to ten of them, using techniques like a rhetorical question or a cliche attached to a point you already make. Most will not be good. That is expected. You keep the handful you would actually say out loud, and those are the ones you carry into the interview.
I still do this exercise on myself before big interviews, and I still write some bad ones. That is not a confession, it is the point. A sound bite is not something you improvise under a hot light for the first time. It is something you draft, reread, and throw half of away, before anyone is listening.
Why this matters (and what most executives get wrong)
Most people treat a great quote as something you either have a gift for or you don't. That belief is the single biggest reason spokespeople show up with nothing quotable prepared. They wait for the moment to inspire them, and the moment, being a moment with a camera pointed at it, rarely does.
What actually produces a usable quote is volume plus editing, done in advance. Write enough of them, in a low-pressure setting, and a few will be strong enough to survive contact with a real question. Wait for one to arrive spontaneously and you are gambling with airtime.
Most of what you write in this exercise will be mediocre. A few will be silly. A handful will be good. You only use the good ones.
The exercise: 5 to 10 sound bites in 5 to 7 minutes
1. Start from an answer you already give
Pull one of the points you already make in interviews, the kind of thing you say in a normal answer with no polish on it. That plain sentence is your raw material, not a blank page.
2. Run it through one technique at a time
Try a rhetorical question version of the point. Try attaching a familiar phrase, the bottom line is, or at the end of the day, to the front of it. Try stating it as an absolute. You are not looking for the right technique on the first try, you are trying several against the same point.
3. Set a timer and keep moving
Five to seven minutes, five to ten attempts. The timer matters more than it sounds. It gives you permission to write something bad and move to the next one instead of polishing a weak line for ten minutes.
4. Read them back and keep only what you would say
Read every line out loud. Some will sound fine on paper and strange coming out of your mouth. Keep only the ones that sound like you, not the ones that sound clever on the page.
I write silly ones I will never use, and lines that stop making sense halfway through. The exercise is not to be brilliant every time. It is to end up with a handful that are.
The mistake most executives make
The most common mistake is skipping the exercise because the first two attempts felt weak. That is exactly the point in the process where most people quit, right before the better lines show up. A rough opening line is not evidence the exercise failed, it is the normal cost of getting to the good ones.
The second mistake is using a sound bite you do not actually believe, because it technically fits the technique. A prediction or an absolute you cannot stand behind is just as quotable as one you can, and it will follow you longer than the interview does.
Case study: the quote that took eight tries
A healthcare executive I worked with needed one strong line for a segment on a new patient program. His first attempts were flat, restating the program's features in order. On try six, he tried the rhetorical question technique on a point he had been making for months: what if the hardest part of getting better was never the treatment, it was getting an appointment.
That line ran as the pull quote in three separate stories that quarter. It was not his most polished sentence in the room that day. It was simply the one, out of eight, that he actually believed and could say without hesitation.
What to do next
Run this exercise before your next interview, not during it. Ten minutes with a timer produces more usable material than an hour of hoping the right line arrives on air. If you want a coach reading your drafts back to you and telling you honestly which ones are worth keeping, get a quick quote.
Start from the techniques themselves in cliches and other sound bite tricks, then once you have a few strong lines, see how they earn their place inside a full answer in the message grid and three part answer.