Till Death Do Us Part by Mary Dutta

It’s wedding season, and that means it’s writing season.

Not everyone tasked with composing speeches, vows, and toasts for various nuptial events has much experience in the writing world. It can be a real challenge crafting something appropriately heartfelt, touching, or humorous.

The internet is full of stories about people who got it wrong. The best man who decided the event was a roast. The maid of honor who didn’t prepare and instead rambled on way too long. The parent who used their time to revisit family grievances.

I'm guessing many of us have examples from our own circles. Last week my hair stylist told me about a wedding where the minister spent his entire sermon enumerating all the things that can go wrong in a marriage, killing the vibe for not only the bride and groom but everyone else in attendance.

When I was younger, I knew a couple whose best man praised the bride for standing by the groom “the whole time he was in jail,” a tidbit unknown to the bride’s extended family until that moment.

For anyone worried about their own marriage-related writing, plenty of published guides exist on how to approach the task. There are also writers-for-hire who will compose a toast, or even wedding vows, for a fee. AI is new option, although it’s hard to imagine that it could come up with a result as personal as such writing is meant to be.

And along with all the cringy examples of orations gone wrong, the internet offers all kinds of resources for wedding participants. One can find collections of best man jokes, variations on vows, and endless videos clips of other people’s celebrations.

I first ventured into the world of wedding writing with my story “Bridesmaid #1” in the anthology First Comes Love, Then Comes Murder, edited by Writers Who Kill’s own Teresa Inge and Heather Weidner and featuring stories by several other of our bloggers as well.

More recently, I wrote a speech for my son’s rehearsal dinner. I didn’t look in a book or online for inspiration. I just used my writing skills to tell the story of my son, his now wife, and what their marriage meant to us. People laughed. They cried. And there was no murder weapon involved. I call that a happy ending.