Getting started with team writing projects
I’ve been doing a lot of freewriting lately, taking inspiration from creativity teachers like Natalie Goldberg, Julia Cameron, and Lynda Barry.
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 or until you’ve filled up a certain number of pages.?
Don’t worry about what’s coming out; just focus on writing words. Or, if you get stuck, you can just start doodling and enjoying 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.
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Getting to the deliverable
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:
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 …”
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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.
The kickoff meeting
For small projects like a short blog post or social post, you can align on objectives through a simple conversation with your client. As informal as this conversation may be, it's helpful to record the decisions somehow — which will take you straight to the next section on creating an assignment brief.
Holding a kickoff meeting with the client is extremely helpful for bigger projects like a research report or a lengthy e-book. It doesn’t have to be long, complicated, or formal, although it might need some of these attributes for complex projects or large teams.?
The assignment brief
In advertising and design, the “creative brief” is a core document that establishes what the client wants, the design parameters, the story the team is trying to convey, how it will be used, and so on.
An assignment brief is the same idea, but for written copy: It’s a document that specifies what we’re trying to produce. It gives the writer or content team clear directions on what they need to write.
An assignment brief can be formal, with a template and multiple boxes that someone needs to fill out before the writing can begin. However, it can also be as simple as a Google document with a short paragraph describing the assignment.
Whatever form the brief takes, it’s indispensable to have something concrete that all stakeholders can refer to when creating, revising, and finalizing the content product.
Take the next step...
I talk more about both of these tools, the kickoff meeting and the assignment brief, in my latest newsletter .
I've also included links there to two useful documents that I've created: A kickoff meeting agenda and notes template, and an assignment brief template. Both of these are based on years of working with content teams and clients, both in-house "customers" and agency clients, and I'm sharing them freely here.
Please take a look and let me know what you think!