There's lots of advice available online and in books on how to write your memoir, novel, or screenplay. Most of it focuses on you, writing as a sole creator.
But those books and how-to videos don't explain how to handle the reality of writing collaboratively.
When you're writing as part of a team, issues crop up that writing manuals don’t cover. Issues like these:
- The engineer who wants your team’s help to revise something they’ve written to make it more publishable, but who can’t let go of specific technical descriptions that they insist are necessary for accuracy — which make the copy almost unreadable.
- The top executive who needs your help writing a speech but is so concerned with specific wording that he’s still asking you for revisions backstage, shortly before he’s about to go on.
- The research firm that keeps revising the results of a survey, forcing you to make endless revisions of the supposedly final report up until the day before it’s scheduled to be published.
- The key member of the writing team, brilliant but inconsistent, who decides that they’ve had enough of your feedback and quits, leaving you to scramble to find someone else to cover their responsibilities.
All of these have happened to me and the teams I’ve been part of. In fact, every story above has happened to me multiple times!
In the moment, each of these incidents felt like a crisis. Yet my teams and I delivered the content we needed to, on time and as promised. In some cases, what we delivered exceeded expectations by far, delivering results that were 10x or 100x the investment our clients had made.
We handled these crises with aplomb because we had a playbook – a guide and practical templates to make content creation, editing, and approvals easier.
This guide is what I wish I'd been given when I started my career. It's the distillation of work I've done for WIRED, VentureBeat, and dozens of other national publications, including thousands of news articles and blogs, dozens of research reports, hundreds of LinkedIn posts, and more.
In this guide to collaborative writing, I show you how to write as part of a team, one where multiple contributors (writers, editors, and designers) work together harmoniously to create and publish work they can all be proud of.
The POWERS process
Let's start with a high-level overview of the six-step team-writing process: Prepare, organize, write, edit, release, and then study the results.
You don't have to use every stage in this process, but it helps. Breaking down content creation into stages is a massive step towards clarifying what needs to be done, when – and by whom.
Follow this process, or something like it, and you'll stay out of trouble most of the time (and you'll be able to get out of trouble easier).
I use a hopefully not-too-dorky acronym to make this writing process more memorable: POWERS.
- Prepare. At this stage, the team generates ideas, establishes goals, does research, and determines the criteria for success. The output of this stage is an assignment brief that describes the work and the expected deliverable.
- Organize. Also known as "getting your stuff together." The output of this stage is usually an outline, which they can deliver to a writer along with the assignment brief.
- Write. Perhaps better called "typing," this stage involves fleshing out the outline to create a first draft.
- Edit. Once you've got a draft, it's time to get it in better shape for publication. Editing can happen at several levels: structural, flow, line, and proofreading. The output of this stage is a publication-ready draft.
- Release. This is the publication stage, when you publish the draft on a blog or social media site or deliver it to the editor of a publication. It's helpful to include promotion and distribution in this stage, too. The output of this stage is a published piece of content — and an audience that’s spending time with it.
- Study the results. Once something has been published and promoted, studying the results can really pay off. How many people read it? How much engagement did it get on social media? Is anyone linking to it? The output of this stage is a report (formal or informal) on the project's results.
That's just scratching the surface of this process. Want to know more? Read on to get detailed advice on each of these six steps.