Stick to a writing plan
Charlotte Booth • 18 October 2022
Create a writing plan to stay on track
I am a planner. In all aspects of my life. Whilst I can be spontaneous for fun, if I want a project to be successful then I have to plan. For some this seems like a lot of work upfront, especially for a writing project. Many would would rather be getting their teeth stuck into the actual fun part of writing.
However, I have found that with a strong plan, any writing project, whether a 100,000-word book or a 600-word blog remains fun, on track and delivered on time.
Although there are many aspects to a successful writing plan, here are the first four steps you should take to ensure a successful finished piece of writing.
Writing a book, article or a report, is all about planning – well it’s not but it makes it a LOT easier. And this means knowing the time-scale.
Whatever the piece of writing you have been asked to do, you need to know the deadline.
When is the piece of writing due?
If you have not been commissioned to write the content, and are choosing to do it, then identify when you would like to have it completed. Treat this like a real deadline.
Step 2 - Length of the written piece
Before starting a writing project you need a rough idea of how long the piece will be. Is it to be a 600-word blog, a 40,000-word book, a series of 280 character tweets or a 10-page report?
Take this word/page count and the deadline date and work out how much you need to write a week/day to reach the deadline. Also consider you may need to factor in time for research, whether book reading or interviewing people as well as time to proofread and edit the finished piece.
Step 3 - Identify your limitations
The worst thing you can do is leave the writing until the day before the deadline, especially if you have no idea of your writing speed and capabilities.
So, time yourself, and identify how long it takes you to write 500 or 1000 words.
From this you can work out how many hours a week it will take you to reach the minimum word count required to hit the deadline.
Step 4 - Diarise the time
If writing a book, or it is now your role to write weekly blogs for your business, the best way of ensuring it gets done and not pushed to the bottom of the to-do list is to diarise it.
If you have one hour spare a week to write, make sure you put it in the diary and treat it like any other meeting or appointment. That way you can be sure to meet your writing deadline without having to pull an all-nighter the day before.
For more help with embarking on a writing project, especially for long-form (2,000 words or more) contact me and we can have a chat, via email
or zoom.
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There is nothing more amusing than checking out mediaeval artistic renditions of lions and other heraldic creatures. These beasts, grimacing and gurning are a strange juxtaposition of human, animal and demon and as far from the cute image of Alex from the Madagascar franchise or in fact a real lion as you could possibly get. There are three main reasons mediaeval lions are so ‘bad’ and un-representational; The artists were following a very tight brief. Some of the artists may never have seen a lion, and were following the descriptions they were given. These lions were representing heraldic principals of bravery, nobility and authority; all very human characteristics. When viewed through this lens it becomes more understandable why they look the way they do, but they are still ‘not right’ and not a great tool for learning about lions. Generative AI is very similar to an uninformed but talented mediaeval artist. There is a element of intelligence but at the end of the day it is following a brief, with no actual ‘knowledge’ of the thing it is producing. As an example, if you prompt your generative AI (ChatGPT and the like) to produce a blog for your new product or service, aimed at your ideal customer avatar you will in all likelihood get a mediaeval lion out the other end. Sort of recognisable, and sort of not. This is because AI doesn’t know what a customer is (ideal or otherwise), has no idea what your product or service is and does, and has no true understanding of how this service or product will serve your ideal customer and their needs. Of course, AI is pulling all the information available from the internet to help with its answer but there is no understanding there. There is no determining fact from falsehoods or even which websites are trustworthy and which are not. So, it skims the internet and puts together content which suits the brief as it understands it. This is then when the actual work should start as this content shouldn’t be used in the raw. It should be edited and tweaked by a human who DOES understand the brief, has been a customer (ideal or otherwise) and can imagine what your ideal customer will feel when using your product or services. We are in a world now, where we have generative AI promoting products and services to humans, when it has no concept of what a human is and how it thinks, meaning the marketing department are in fact more important than ever for ensuring content and copy is aimed at humans and human emotions. You could argue that the world would be a more entertaining place if there were more mediaeval lions in it, but it wouldn’t be a great environment for learning, or for basing purchasing decisions on. If you want to maintain the human element in your content, then I would love to help . Explain the brief, your CTA and your ideal client and I will know what I need to ask to get a clear idea before writing. Then you can rest assured your content was written by a human for a human and we can leave the mediaeval lions to the museums.
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