So you’ve hired or are thinking of hiring your first YouTube scriptwriter, first of all, celebrate the milestone! This likely means your channel is growing and that you’re getting serious.
Hiring a writer will save you time, improve the quality of your content and help you stay consistent without burning out. Sounds pretty great.
But for all of those wonderful things to happen, you have to make sure your writer knows what to deliver and how you go about communicating this information can mark the difference between a great collaboration and one that struggles.
Let’s imagine two scenarios, A and B, both run educational channels and have the same voice and style. Let’s see how these two channels fare at briefing their writers and what effects that produces.
1. Voice. Voice. Voice.
Before we get into the actual script, the first thing your writer needs to understand is your voice. If you have a style guide share it, if not, be open to sharing past scripts or parts of your thought process for the videos you’re proudest of.
Your writer will likely spark this conversation and ask you specifically for what they need, but if you really care about them matching your voice, it never hurts to offer as much help as possible.
Some writers include a “discovery” phase where they get to know your voice and echo it back to you in a short section paragraph as part of the project fee.
Channel A approaches this step with a prepared doc they wrote that includes a description of their voice, links to their content inspirations and breakdowns of their own videos.
After a few clarifying questions from the writer, both parties feel confident that the voice will be matched, and that any issues that arise can be solved cleanly through communication and feedback rounds.
Channel B leaves this in the writer’s hands and struggles to express exactly what they’re looking for, but they know what they aren’t looking for. With some targeted questions from the writer, they figure out a rough shared view of the channel’s voice, but this isn’t communicated as clearly as it could have been.
By result, both parties feel more shaky going in and may have a completely different interpretations of the same core voice which will likely lengthen the process and result in a script that isn’t a great fit for the channel, not because the writer isn’t skilled, but because there was a mismatch at the voice level.
2. Format
If you’ve been a solo writer for a while, chances are you’ve developed a way you like formatting your videos for recording, whether that be colour coding A-roll and B-roll, writing in a table or simply writing in paragraphs.
Whatever it is, if you want to keep this format, you need to share it with your writer.
Channel A does this by sharing past scripts and maybe even a template that they themselves use. The finished script is ready to be recorded.
Channel B doesn’t share any of this, perhaps because they don’t realise that formatting is an important part of their pipeline or because they feel the writer will pick it up intrinsically. The finished script may have to be re-organised into the desired format which lengthens the production pipeline.
3. Idea & Approach
You have to make sure your writer understands the idea you want to explore. Depending on when your writer is stepping in, this idea may be more or less developed, but they still need to understand what you’re going for.
This can be done by giving access to a shared doc or platform like trello (though this is more common in multi-person teams), or by sharing your thoughts on a call or via email.
Channel A sends their writer a mini-pitch for the video. The titles they’re considering, the argument they want to make and their thoughts on where they would like to take it. As a result, the writer understands the core focus of the video and can deliver a script that adheres to it.
Channel B only sends the title and a sentence or two via email, likely because the idea isn’t too fleshed out yet. This means the writer is free to interpret what little content there is and they flush it out into an outline using their skillset and experience. However, this may be very different to what they imagined. .
4. Communication is King
As with many relationships in life, the key to a strong professional relationship with your writer is clear communication. As long as you clearly communicate what you’re looking for, and your writer feels comfortable and confident in that communication, then the brief was successful! That’s the key difference between channels A and B.
After this point, trust the writer to do what they do best, which is write. Be careful to not micromanage and know that the great brief you delivered will result in a script that requires no or very minimal tweaks, and that will soon be ready to record.
More than that, enjoy all that fresh free time you’ve just received, and remember to tell your writer if they did a good job because this will only help make the next script even stronger.