Matthew Stibbe at the Bad Language blog posts on how to guarantee your writing project will fail.
He makes six good points. Here’s the top one:
Don’t give a brief. Or a bad one. Or an incomplete one. I’ve said it before, but almost every bad project can be traced back to a bad brief, so this is your go-to screw up if you want to guarantee an epic fail.
I agree. I’ve just started a writing business here in New Zealand and while I haven’t yet developed a standard brief template, I can already see getting a formal brief can help enormously.
A good brief doesn’t have to be long or complicated. It does need to be clear.
It doesn’t have to be a formal brief – it can be as quick as five minutes or 100 words – but you really need some kind of brief to refer to. I’ve got a case at the moment where I’ve done a new case study for the same client – the tenth or twelfth for them – and suddenly there’s a new manager who thinks the style, flow, audience should be different. I don’t have a brief to fall back on as I got into a repeat pattern with the client and now I have to rewrite the case study. Argghhh.