Monday Mastery: A creative use case for templates
Standing out in a world of clones.
Welcome to Monday Mastery, a series designed to shift your perspective, teach you new techniques, and help you become a more effective writer, one tip at a time.
You communicate online to stand out. To show how you’re different. To raise awareness and be heard.
The last thing you want is to sound like a clone and get lost in the crowd.
This is one of the primary reasons I argue you shouldn’t use AI to write for you. To inspire your own creativity, to wrestle with your ideas, to brainstorm, sure — but not to write for you.
It’s also why I don’t believe templates are entirely helpful, beyond this one use case:
Giving you something to push off of when you sit down to write.
Never start with a blank page
The blank page can be the scariest thing in the world to really smart people.
You have a million ideas, all vying for screentime. It’s enough to make you freeze with decision overwhelm.
Don’t set yourself up for failure.
Put something on the page.
Personally, I like starting with a clip of research.
I grab a stat or a quote, or something that speaks to the topic I want to get at, and I paste it on the page (in red font, to remind me that it’s not mine, and avoid accidental plagiarism as I craft my content). Those few little words on the page are usually enough to shut down my decision overwhelm, inspire a response and get my fingers flying on the keyboard.
But a template can be an alternative, if you don’t follow it religiously.
Use a template as something to respond to.
To push off of.
To bump up against and react to.
Here’s an example.
This comes from one of my favorite publishing business experts, Joanna Penn:
All you need for a story is:
A character
In a setting
Who has a goal
Who has to overcome all kinds of conflict on the way to achieving that goal while
Someone or something tries to stop them
The character either achieves their goal or fails
And along the way, they go through some kind of transformation
Plop that template on a blank page and see what stirs up in your creative spirit. That could be a great jumping off point for a case study, a sales page, an article, a personal story for a keynote speech, or an intriguing LinkedIn post.
See what happens when you don’t take a template as law, but as something to respond to.