How to help writers do their best work

Good writers content leads are hard to find.

There are loads of good writers out there but there's this delusional expectation that they should be perfect for your content from day 1.

Here are the truths I've discovered from my experience building a writing team:

• Most of the time content leads (or whoever is prepping the brief) are either lazy or somehow don't understand the value it brings to invest time into process documentation, brief creation, and constructive feedback.
• Even the best, most highly recommended writers are rough around the edges during the first assignment.
• A writer who both cares and has a strong foundational skillset has the potential to be as sharp as the feedback you give them. Yes, this can require a higher upfront investment time-wise but it means you'll work faster in the long run.

I can't guarantee investing your valuable time will pay off with every single writer but I can guarantee if you don't do it at all you'll never get the best work out of any writer (or even AI writing tool) you work with.

Today, I want to share what I learned along the way to help your team of writers do their best work.

1. Share content guidelines as a pre-read and then host an onboarding call

Your content brief is like a map to success for a writer. The map will be as good as your research.

Here's a quick list of what I share and do:

• General Process: Share general content documentation such as a style guide
• Research & Brief: Invest time into detailed topic research to help you assemble a clear and detailed content brief
• Feedback Loop: Welcome feedback from writers on anything unclear so you can improve the documentation you give them in the future

Let's dig into each of these a bit more.

🔎 General Process and Documentation

Content style guide, audience insights, examples of your best content pieces. Share everything you can that creates clarity around how your brand does content. Then, book some one-on-one Q&A time to discuss anything that's unclear.

📄 Research & Brief

To your advantage, most of your competitors don't understand the potential of content. So they use AI to whip up something basic as fuck and as cheaply as possible for the sake of getting a bunch of shit up.

It's like they're hoarders of random content pieces semi-stiched together like Frankenstein.

Don't get me wrong, AI is great but most teams don't know how to use it optimally (more on this another day).

But the few that "get it" are going above and beyond to understand what great looks like, round up subject matter expert POVs, and build resources so useful they build a brand of content people revisit because it helped them.

If you want to make memorable and effective content you need to invest time into researching and defining what that looks like so a writer can build on it.

Dive deep into topic research.
Share examples.

Provide all the context a writer could need to make exactly the content your company wants.

Comment: I'm going to update my older post about blog topic research to elaborate on how I do this. I'm on a break and without child care as I write this 5 to 15 minutes at a time every other day so bear with me haha

🔁 Feedback Loop

My briefs for VEED in 2021 looked totally different from my briefs by the end of that year. This wouldn't have been possible if feedback were only one-sided.

Content is a collaborative effort.

As a leader you need to be receptive to being told you are wrong or could have done something better.
If you foster a culture of open communication you'll learn and grow from observing and receiving feedback from writers.

Here are some things I suggest doing:

• Ask writers how your briefs could be better. Do they find anything is missing or particularly confusing?
• Ask writers how you can help them feel more confident in their work. For example, do you need to be more vocal when they do something well that you want to keep seeing in future pieces?

You'll be pleasantly surprised with how your relationship and workflow will improve as you get into this habit of checking in.

However, it can be hard to get back the first-ever critique from a writer. It's oftentimes a rarity to work in an environment where you feel safe to be candid.

What helped me was to bring up something specific I was aware I needed help with. I needed to show I was self-aware, receptive to feedback and valued the writer's wisdom.

For example, when I was a new editor, I shared I was new and loved how a writer I was working with had worked with such prestigious publications. Surely they had learned so much from top editors. I then asked them what are some things from their experience of working with more seasoned editors that they think I could do to make both of our jobs easier?

When framed like this, it achieves two things:

1. It takes the pressure off of having to come up with something specific to point out
2. It paves the way for the writer to feel comfortable bringing things up later on once they realize you're not a lunatic who will lose their marbles when faced with feedback.

2. Highlight common mistakes other writers tend to make

"Here's what writers tend to get wrong..."

Whenever I said this to a writer I could feel them leaning in all ears. We all have a little (or big) competitive spark within us where we want to be better than others. We don't want to make the same mistake everyone else made.

Everyone else may have made that mistake...but you won't.

You're different.

For example, intros can be hard to write. The most common mistake I saw most writers make was to write extremely long intros that tried too hard to inject humor, had too much detail, or led with the same boring statistic every other marketing blog had led with.

After some time of noticing frequently made mistakes I made a small doc rounding up the top 3 to 5 most common mistakes and examples of what good looks like.

This served as a cheat sheet for writers who had a habit of making some of the mistakes.

3. Add context, share examples, and ask open-ended questions

Imagine you're assembling a whole set of IKEA furniture using a manual without illustrations alongside your partner who has a manual with illustrations

...and they refuse to share.



You're gonna be raising your voices by step 2 and breaking up by step 3 🤣

You can't expect writers to write the entire piece or fix that paragraph if you don't help them visualize the end goal.

"I don't like this, change it" is not good feedback.

This is especially true if you work in an early stage company and therefore have a lower budget allowing you only to hire more affordable junior writers.

You'll both become frustrated and part ways.

Instead, here's what you can do:

• Provide context for visualization:
  • what does great look like?
  • how do the words on the page in question stray away from this?
  • can you provide them a rough example of a better direction the writing could take whether you quickly write some sample copy or link to an example?
• Show them you value their voice: ask them how/what they'd do to fix it with this context in mind.
  

Yes, you will spend more time in the beginning doing edits and sharing examples. But it'll pay off with dividends if you invest in your writer's development.

4. Don't sugarcoat bullshit or hope bad habits improve on their own

It's weird. Maybe it's just me but in the early days of editing I found myself feeling bad about calling out things I wasn't happy with. I think it's because I've always struggled with being somewhat of a people-pleaser and anxiety.

I didn't want writers to feel bad or think I'm a bitch. I wrote excessively long comments that took too long to call something out. I don't blame writers for glazing over these. It was my fault I wasn't direct enough and so the same mistakes happened over and over...

...until I got fed up with having to do so many edits myself that I may as well have written the piece myself.

After some reflection, I realized what matters is the intent behind my comments. My intent is always to get the best content out there and to do so I believe in open communication to help writers do their best work. Reading the book Radical Candor helped me loads with this.

So now, I call things what they are.

A writer who didn't follow a brief at all is a writer who didn't read the brief
A redundant sentence is a redundant sentence
A fluffy intro is a fluffy intro

You're doing everyone a disservice by not saying the hard things because you're scared of being misunderstood and disliked.

In the end that's not helpful for anyone.

That's not nice is it?

For example, one of the writers I worked with for over a year had gotten to a point where I was consistently happy with their work and needed less and less time spent on the editing phase.

Until one day I started noticing inconsistencies.

Old mistakes were being made all over again despite me pointing it out and each piece felt written by at least 2 different people. I assumed they were trying to scale their business by hiring other writers so they could take on more clients rather than raising their pricing to profit more from fewer clients. I also thought maybe something might be happening in their life that made juggling projects more difficult.

I decided to set time aside to talk to the writer about it.

They ended up sharing they were in fact trying to figure out how to scale their businesses and were struggling with managing new writers. Long story short, they said they would not put new writers on future pieces and would do the work themselves again. They also raised their prices so they could focus on earning more without the stress of balancing being both the creator and people manager.

Problems will rarely ever fix themselves.
Bring things up and enter conversations with an open mind.

Before I log off, I'll leave you with some food for thought...

If there's anything I've learned as a hiring manager it's to listen to your gut and don't take yourself so seriously. Content is supposed to be fun to make. It's soul-destroying to do that with a stick up your ass and your intuition clogged up with your lack of trust in your own voice.

There's all this content, including what you're reading right now, that tries to help guide you.

That's great.

Sometimes it's exactly what you need.

But other times you need to get better at listening to that voice within and learning to ask questions that'll give you the custom-tailored insights no newsletter, blog, or course can give you.