- Steven Wilson-Beales
Use Creative Writing Techniques To Shape Your Content Design
This week I attended another of Tom Hewitson‘s excellent Content Lab sessions, this time looking at how creative writing exercises can feed into content design. Although Content Strategy/Content Design/ContentMarketing are fairly new disciplines, it’s already fairly easy to follow ‘established’ methods which may not break any exciting new ground. I know that might be controversial so I’ll let that one hang for a while…
Anyway, at the session we had the wonderful Jacqui Lofthouse who took us through a series of exercises like the following:
Individual: Here’s a random photo of a person and answer the following – what’s his/her name?, What do they most regret? Who do they hate? What stops them sleeping at night?
Group: Flesh out your characters further with some inspiring ‘props’ (a series of envelopes with random objects e.g. a dollar note etc). What is the connection between the objects and the character?
Group: Write, without editing, about your character for six minutes. Here’s a scene to get you going…
Apart from being fun session (I rarely go to creative writing sessions) I found the techniques above really focused the mind around what the character thought and felt in a moment in time. The six minute stream-of-conscious approach was also good at fleshing out aspects that might have been easily deleted in the writing process.
You can see how this might be useful in persona-building activities and is certainly something I’d consider with my own team. However, I would have to be careful not to conflate an entirely fictitious character with a user: personas do have a habit of taking on a life of their own. But as a quick exercise to really engage a team around a topic/challenge, this was really fun exercise to explore.
Meet Maria. Now, she has a story to tell… #contentstrategy #ux #uxdesign pic.twitter.com/3nPFew8xqg — Steven Wilson-Beales (@stevewbeales) April 26, 2016
What’s the story behind your brand’s bot? #contentstrategy #ux #uxdesign pic.twitter.com/v68P7CAynh — Steven Wilson-Beales (@stevewbeales) April 26, 2016
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