How to make sure your writing project will fail Don't give a brief . Or a bad one. Or an incomplete one. I've said it before, but almost every bad project can be traced back to a bad brief , so this is your go-to screw up if you want to guarantee an epic fail. Post navigation One thought on " How to make sure your writing project will fail " It doesn't have to be a formal brief -- it can be as quick as five minutes or 100 words -- but you really need some kind of brief to refer to. I've got a case at the moment where I've done a new case study for the same client -- the tenth or twelfth for them -- and suddenly there's a new manager who thinks the style, flow, audience should be different. I don't have a brief to fall back on as I got into a repeat pattern with the client and now I have to rewrite the case study. Argghhh.