How to start a writing project with a team
Preparation is everything - which doesn't mean we always do it
I’ve been doing a lot of freewriting lately, taking inspiration from creativity teachers like Natalie Goldberg, Julia Cameron, and Lynda Barry (Lynda Barry! is! amazing!).
The idea is that you sit down with some blank pages in front of you and just start writing, either for a set amount of time (10 or 15 minutes) or until you’ve filled up a certain number of pages (2 or 3).
Don’t worry about what’s coming out; just focus on writing words. Or, if you get stuck, you can do some doodling and just enjoy the way the lines spill out of your pen onto the page.
The important thing is to keep the pen moving.
Freewriting is a fabulous exercise for unlocking your inner creativity.
It’s also pretty much the opposite of how you want to start with a collaborative team writing project — unless your goal is to spark maximum creativity. In that case, give everyone on your team some blank paper and some pens, and free up an hour for them to start scribbling ideas.
This is not a bad idea, actually, and more corporations should consider creativity workshops like this instead of trying to figure out what formula will let them use AI to produce as much cookie-cutter SEO content as possible without human intervention.
(Prediction: Within the coming year, AI content will be so generic and ubiquitous that we’ll start prizing actual stories from actual human beings. We will crave human connection amid the coming flood of AI-powered bullshit, and the real human voices will — I hope — stand out like lighthouses on a foggy night.
If you want the help of an experienced journalist and storyteller so that you can be the lighthouse instead of the fog, let’s talk.)
That said, most content projects don’t aim at stimulating wild creativity but at producing a specific deliverable: A blog post, a byline, a white paper, or an e-book.
When kicking off a writing project like this, it's beneficial for everyone to agree on a few key things:
what we’re doing
when it’s due
why we’re doing it
Such alignment is as necessary for a small project like a short blog post as it is for something big like an annual report.
But that doesn’t mean content teams always do this. I've worked on plenty of projects that started without a clear idea of what we were doing. It inevitably leads to wasted work and confusion down the line.
Client: "We need a byline on topic X. We'll put our CTO's name on it."
Me: "Great. When is it due, and what's the goal?"
Client: "It's an open deadline, but we'd like it by the end of next week. The goal? We need some media hits, but we don’t have any news to announce, so the goal is to publish this byline.”
Me: “Okay …”
Two or three weeks later, we’ve created a draft, and we're deep in revisions when it suddenly emerges that the CTO has different priorities or that the client has decided to focus on a more urgent press release. The draft is put on the back burner. A month after that, the client returns their attention to the piece but decides to rework it so they can attribute it to the CMO instead. Someone else, from the CMO's team, starts editing the draft and wonders what the hell this is and who produced this, because it doesn't align with anything the CMO talks about.
Sigh.
These kinds of direction changes happen all the time — and part of writing as a content team means being flexible enough to roll with the changes that are an inevitable part of organizational life.
However, having goals spelled out at the start provides a framework that will make everyone's life slightly saner.
Two tools can help you get closer to sane in your content projects: A project kickoff meeting and a well-structured assignment brief.
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Hello, friend! I’ve moved my newsletter over to my main website at dylan.tweney.com. To read the rest of this post — including templates for a project kickoff meeting agenda and for an assignment brief — please click through to its new home here:
I really like the following paragraph. Be your own client!
"If your clients don’t give you an assignment brief or are reluctant to work with you on creating one, don’t push it — make it for yourself instead. The idea here is not to force clients to fill out a form before working with you, but rather to create some structure for a conversation with the client."
Dylan is providing a lot of great tools that can help a wide variety of people in tackling writing jobs. Much of it also applies to solo writers. Whether solo or a mob of five, thinking comes first, the writing is second.