How the Rules of Fiction Can Teach You (Almost) Everything About Content Strategy
Before I ever heard of a thing called content strategy, I studied English and Creative Writing, worked in publishing for a few years, and got an MFA in fiction. After graduating (and swearing off academia for awhile), I landed my first job in tech, managing content marketing for a health tech startup.
I knew very little about the tech and design worlds at the time, but I quickly learned that a lot of design firms and startups needed a person who knew language and story as well as developers knew code. People had begun to catch on to the idea of language and story as crucial components of design, two things I knew well. I only needed to teach myself the right processes.
Lately, I’ve begun to encounter more and more ex-MFAers and creative writing majors who did the same thing and now work in content strategy and UX or have just started to explore these fields as careers. It makes sense given how big a role storytelling has become in design, how important good design has become for building successful products and experiences, and how adept people who study fiction are at crafting stories.
Of course, it takes a lot of work to learn how to use the tools of content strategy. But if you’ve ever studied fiction, you’ll find that many of the principles content strategists adhere to are similar to those you first encountered as rules for writing.
1. Maintain the Fictive Dream
For many fiction writers, this is one of the first concepts you learn in an undergraduate workshop. It was most famously articulated by John Gardner, a well-known writing instructor and writer (he taught Raymond Carver at one point):
“In the writing state—the state of inspiration—the fictive dream springs up fully alive: the writer forgets the words he has written on the page and sees, instead, his characters moving around their rooms, hunting through cupboards, glancing irritably through their mail, setting mousetraps, loading pistols. The dream is as alive and compelling as one’s dreams at night, and when the writer writes down on paper what he has imagined, the words, however inadequate, do not distract his mind from the fictive dream but provide him with a fix on it, so that when the dream flags he can reread what he’s written and find the dream starting up again.”
Gardner is, of course, talking about the writing process, a state of mind the writer aspires to while working.
When a writer learns this concept in class, however, the discussion often focuses on how that dream can impact a reader. As in: your job as a writer is to maintain the fictive dream.
In workshop, it’s common for students to point out parts of a story where the dream fails, meaning they feel like an aspect of the story “is off” or “pierces the fictive dream” or "pulls them out of the dream.”
How this Impacts Content Strategy:
Content strategy aims to tell a story about your product or service through content in a way that’s appealing to customers and encourages them to take actions valuable to your business. The story begins the first time a user, your main character, comes into contact with your content -- whether that be a tweet, a social ad, a blog post, any piece of content -- and continues as they journey deeper into your brand’s content eco-system.
Content strategists lead the effort to identify and plan for the content that will guide this journey -- from early awareness through education/consideration, conversion, and onto retention and engagement. To do so effectively, you must map out the journey your user needs to take early on in the strategy process so that you can match content to channels and objectives at each step along the way.
Remember that one weak link can result in a lot of people putting your story down. So if you notice a drop off somewhere, try to think about how the content a user encounters at this stage might be pulling them out of the dream.
2. Use Realistic (Sounding) Dialogue
In one of the first creative workshops I ever took, the professor sent us out to eavesdrop on conversations around campus. We learned two things:
- People use a lot of needless words in everyday conversation.
- The key to writing good dialogue is to focus on the substance hidden in everyday talk. Meaning: be real, but cut the fluff.
How this Impacts Content Strategy:
One cannot undervalue the importance of good copywriting to UX and content strategy.
Perform an exercise like this with your users. Listen to them (ideally by interviewing some face to face, but you can also compile research from other sources like online discussion forums and surveys), and channel what you learn into writing that mimics the way your target audience speaks and thinks. Avoid relying on internal descriptions and vocabulary that might have meaning to your internal team but sound like gibberish to the people that matter most.
Once you have a handle on what language works best, create a style guide so that you can easily share these findings with any new content creators that join your team.
3. Don’t Overwrite
Gosh, that’s a stunning table. The writer spent three whole paragraphs describing its particular grain of wood, the shadow it casts in the room at noon, a set of candles at its center. Did we need all this?
Of course, there can be a time and place for florid prose in fiction, but generally speaking workshops encourage young writers to only spend time describing items in their stories that matter, meaning you don’t describe a table just because it’s there; you describe a table because it adds to the story, tells you something about the characters, the situation, the central conflict.
Likewise, you don’t mention a gun hanging on the wall unless you plan on someone using it.
How this Impacts Content Strategy.
Make sure each piece of content you’re planning for corresponds to a measurable goal. Don’t produce just because you can. Produce because it may help you reach an objective. Content takes effort. Effort takes time. Time costs money.
Don’t spend your whole day describing a table.
4. Control Time
Once, I asked my professor how I could move beyond writing one scene stories. I had this fixation on never letting my characters out of my sight. I had to write every movement, every moment in time, from the beginning of my story to the end. The problem, as I explained it to her, was that some of those moments were just plain boring. Car rides, meals, showers. Who wants to read about that?
Her answer was pretty straightforward and blew my 18-year-old mind: end your sentence, hit enter on the keyboard twice, and start a new scene that jumps forward in time to the next important moment in the story.
You control time in your story, she reminded me, and as long as you control it responsibly your reader will accept the pace.
How this Impacts Content Strategy:
Be aware of how long it takes a user to move through the lifecycle with your product or service. Take a look at your analytics data, talk to your sales teams/account reps/users, and create a plan for content based on what you learn that that guides users at a reasonable pace from one important moment in the journey to the next.
Also, figure out what channels provide the most value for each scene/moment.
Maybe later stages in the cycle should depend a lot on content delivered directly through email. Perhaps the website needs to focus more on early-stage awareness content.
Knowing the crucial scenes in your content strategy's story helps ensure that you deliver the right content at the right time in the user’s journey.
5. Put Your Butt in the Chair
Everyone who has ever attempted to write fiction has heard this piece of conventional wisdom: you need to put in chair time.
Write. Sit at your desk and just do it. Slog through the messy days, when it seems like you can’t even compose one decent sentence, so that you can get to the insightful, groundbreaking moments.
At times, it might feel like your book will never come together, but it will...if you stay determined and keep coming back to the chair.
How this Impacts Content Strategy:
If you’ve just discovered that your organization could benefit from some content strategy, put in the chair time.
In terms of how you approach the project, this means you need to devote some serious time to your content. Don’t jump to conclusions. Don’t take shortcuts. Don’t guess when it comes to content.
Be ready to sit in the chair and spent time with your interview notes, user research, audits, and planning documents.
Success will be hard work, and content projects can be big and intimidating, like novels. At some point, you’re going to look at the mess of content you’ve discovered and wonder if it will ever unravel.
But don’t worry. If you keep your butt in the chair and stick to your plan, it will.