You're Not Boring. Your Brief Is.
A few months ago, a writer I mentor called me in despair. "I think I've become boring," she said. "Everything I write sounds the same. It's all flat. I used to be good at this."
She sent me her last five pieces. I read them. She was right, they were flat. But not because she'd become a bad writer. Because every single brief she'd been given was a version of the same prompt: "Write a 1,200-word blog post about [topic]. Include these keywords. Reference these product features. Target this persona."
The briefs were so constraining that there was no room for her to actually write. She was filling in a template, not creating content. It was like asking a chef to cook a great meal but telling them they can only use three ingredients, the oven must be set to exactly 350 degrees, and the plate has to be beige.
The brief is the problem, not the writer
I've been saying this for years and I will keep saying it until someone either listens or asks me to stop: most bad content isn't the writer's fault. It's the brief's fault.
Bad briefs produce bad content the way bad soil produces bad tomatoes. You can be the world's greatest gardener, but if the soil has nothing in it, you're getting sad tomatoes. I'm not even a gardener and I know this. (My herb garden is a disaster. The basil has given up on life.)
If your content is boring, don't blame the writer. Look at what you asked them to write. The brief is the soil. The content is the tomato.
What a bad brief looks like
You've seen these. You might have written these. I've definitely written these, earlier in my career, before I knew better.
Topic: Cloud migration best practices
Length: 1,500 words
Keywords: cloud migration, digital transformation, IT modernization
Persona: IT decision maker
CTA: Download whitepaper
Notes: Make it engaging
"Make it engaging." That's my favorite part. That's like handing someone a bucket of grey paint and saying "make it colorful." How? With what?
A brief like this gives a writer nothing to work with. No angle. No story. No point of view. No specificity. Nothing that would distinguish this piece from the ten thousand other blog posts about cloud migration best practices that already exist and that nobody has ever read for pleasure.
What a good brief looks like
A good brief does one thing: it gives the writer a reason to write. Not just a topic. A reason.
Here's a better version of that same brief:
Topic: Why cloud migrations fail
Angle: Talk to Marcus on the solutions team. He just finished a project where the client's migration went sideways because nobody talked to the end users before starting. There's a great story there about assumptions.
Audience: IT leaders who've been burned before or are afraid of getting burned
The one thing we want them to take away: Migration is a people problem, not a tech problem
Length: Whatever it takes to tell the story well
See the difference? The second brief has a story. It has a specific person to talk to. It has a point of view. It has an emotional truth. A writer can work with this. A writer can write something genuinely interesting with this, because the brief itself is interesting.
Why this matters more than you think
Bad briefs don't just produce bad content. They destroy writers. I mean it. I've watched talented writers burn out, lose confidence, and leave the industry because they spent years being asked to produce interesting work from uninteresting briefs and then being told the results weren't good enough.
Ann Handley says that good writing is a habit, not a gift. I agree. But good writing also requires good conditions. You can't write well about nothing. You can't spin gold from empty air. Even Rumpelstiltskin needed straw.
If you're managing writers, the single most impactful thing you can do for content quality isn't hiring better writers or buying better tools. It's writing better briefs. Give your writers something real to work with and then get out of their way.
A brief should be a conversation
The best briefs I've ever received weren't documents. They were conversations. A stakeholder calling me and saying, "Hey, something interesting happened with a client this week, I think there's a story here." Then we'd talk about it for twenty minutes and I'd walk away with more material than I could use.
That twenty-minute conversation was worth more than any template. Because templates capture information. Conversations capture energy. And energy is what makes the difference between content people read and content people politely ignore.
A brief should make a writer excited to write. If it doesn't, it's not a brief. It's a chore list.
To the writer who thinks they're boring
If you're reading this and you feel like my mentee felt, stuck and flat and wondering if you've lost whatever spark you once had, I want you to hear this: you haven't lost it. The spark is there. It just doesn't have anything to catch fire on.
Write something for yourself this week. Not for a client. Not for a content calendar. Not from a brief. Just write about something you actually care about, in your actual voice, with no keyword targets and no persona to satisfy.
I bet you'll remember pretty quickly that you're not boring at all. Your brief was.