Opinion
Why We Should Stop Calling Creative Writing 'Content'
Every editor has a version of this moment. A piece arrives — a personal essay, a short story, a column about a bus route the writer has known for thirty years — and the covering note calls it 'content'. The piece is fine. The note is the problem.
'Content' describes what fills a container, and it treats the container as the interesting part. That is the wrong way round for writing, where the shape is the meaning. Yet the word has spread so far that plenty of writers now use it about their own work without noticing.
A bowl of soup in a different bowl
Consider what the container metaphor commits us to. Soup is soup whether it arrives in a chipped mug or a white bowl. Pour it elsewhere and nothing is lost. If that is how we think about writing, then an essay is a quantity of words that can be tipped into any shape the schedule requires: 900 for the newsletter, 400 for the blog, the same argument spread thinner for a post.
Now try the metaphor on a real piece. An essay about a father's stroke that opens with the sound of a car park barrier has an order that carries the feeling. The first line is not a lid. Rearranged, the piece still technically says the same things and means something else. Stories work the same way: a sentence in the right place can do the job of a paragraph, and one in the wrong place can undo the one before it. That kind of pressure only exists when the writer has been thinking about a reader's experience rather than a slot on the calendar.
The pipeline does not fit the work
Content thinking loves throughput. Ideas go in one end and publishable units come out the other, on schedule, and anything that slows the line is a problem. Writers are then measured by how much comes out, which is the easiest thing to measure and the least useful.
Real writing is full of dead ends. It looks like this:
- Three weeks on a 1,200-word piece, of which 900 words get deleted.
- A draft abandoned because it was quietly turning into a different, better piece.
- An afternoon spent finding the right word for a particular sound.
Under the pipeline model, every item on that list is waste. Under any honest model of craft, that is the work itself.
You can hear the vocabulary in a briefing. How long does it need to be? Can we get five posts out of this? What's the hook? Just get a draft down and we'll tighten it later. Some of those questions are reasonable — a word count is a useful constraint, and a strong opening is a courtesy to the reader. The trouble starts when they arrive before the piece has a reason to exist, because then you are deciding the shape of something before you know what it is.
Readers notice, even when they cannot say why
Nobody finishes a piece of writing and says, 'That was well padded.' They simply stop reading. Or they skim, and then they do not come back.
There is a particular feeling that comes with reading something a writer needed to write: the sense of being told something instead of being sold a slot. It is hard to define and easy to feel — a specificity, a willingness to slow down, an opinion that has been tested against something awkward. Filler has a smoothness that gives it away. It moves, it is grammatical, and it has nothing at stake.
Calling readers an 'audience' does something similar. Audiences sit in rows and receive. Readers argue, skip, reread, put the page down and think about their own mother. Write for one of those.
What the label costs the writer
The word is not only a description of the work. Writers internalise it.
You begin to think of your own sentences as inventory. You ask whether a piece is worth writing before you have written it, which is a question nobody can answer in advance. You feel faintly ridiculous for caring about a comma. And you join a category so wide it says nothing at all: a novelist, a poet and someone filming a fifteen-second clip all get the same badge. That is not a swipe at the person with the camera. It is that the label erases distinctions that took a long time to build, and makes it harder to say what kind of attention your work is asking for.
Words worth keeping
English has a good supply of alternatives, and most of them are more precise than 'content':
- Essay, story, poem, review, column, dispatch — each tells the reader what kind of attention is being asked for.
- Piece — modest and useful when the form is still settling.
- Draft — honest about the fact that this is not finished.
- Work — a small word doing a lot: it implies that someone made it.
None of this means every sentence must be literature. Plenty of writing has a job to do: instructions, a product description, a charity's appeal. But care shows even there. The best commercial writing tends to come from people who would never describe it as content, and the difference is usually visible in the second paragraph, where they start telling you something instead of clearing their throat.
How to stop, starting this week
A few practical moves. None of them requires anyone's permission.
- Audit your own vocabulary. For a week, notice every time you call your work content — in notes, emails, a to-do list. Change the word. The point is to catch the habit, not to police your own speech.
- Write one piece as though it were the only one. No recycling plan, no format list. Give a single draft everything you have and see what it turns into.
- Find your first real sentence. Most padded openings are throat-clearing. Cut until you reach the sentence that could not be moved, and start there.
- Keep the dead ends. Have a folder for abandoned drafts. Some are practice, some are seeds, and none of them are waste.
- Write to one person. Choose someone specific and write the piece at them. If a line would bore them, it will bore everyone.
Do that for a few weeks and the word starts to feel wrong in your mouth, which is the point. 'Content' is a fine label for a form field in a system that needs to know what goes in a box. It is a poor label for an essay and a worse one for a story. Those need the thing a box never asks about: a reason to be read.
Photo: oceanverde / Pixabay
