I've spent several years now writing content for various UK government services. One thing I have to do is apply Government Design Service (GDS) standards to everything I write. In writing and editing my latest novel, I've learned, sometimes the hard way, that there is more common ground between my day job and the fiction writing than I realised.
My wants vs. their needs
The central principle of content design — the thing GDS drills into every piece of guidance, every transaction, every error message — is that you write for the user's need, not the organisation's need to explain itself.
Government departments love to explain themselves. They want to give context. History. Rationale. They want the reader to understand why the policy exists, how it came about, what considerations shaped it. None of which the user asked for. They arrived with a specific need — can I apply for this, and how — and everything that doesn't serve that need is frustration and friction to them.
Fiction writers do the same thing.
Their world-building is so elaborate, so lovingly constructed, that the writer can't bear to leave any of it off the page. The reader gets three paragraphs on the political history of the kingdom or spaceport they've just arrived in, delivered to a character who usually already knows it. The exposition isn't there because the reader needs it. It's there because the writer wants to show you their work.
When you've spent years cutting that instinct out of your professional writing, you start to see it clearly in your fiction. The question becomes automatic: whose need does this sentence serve? If the answer is mine, not the reader's, it goes.
Character need is user need
GDS's approach to content starts with user needs. Before I write a single word, I make sure I can articulate what the user is trying to do, what they already know, and what would actually help them. Everything flows from that.
When I was writing early drafts of my fantasy novel, I'd often start scenes from my own position — what I wanted to establish, what information I needed to plant, what the scene was supposed to accomplish structurally. The scenes were functional but inert. They moved pieces around the board. Then I'd get notes back from Jo: There's no agency! Why are they even doing this? This is all a bit dull. It hurt, but it was true. And it made me think. Clearly, I was doing something wrong.
The shift that content design had already trained me to do, and I realised I wasn't applying to my fiction writing, was to start from character need. What does this person want, right now, in this scene? What do they know? What are they trying to do? Write from inside that, and the scene suddenly has energy because the character has purpose.
The transition from inert to active prose, when you get it right, is weirdly palpable. Flat scenes suddenly have an energy about them. Characters come alive. And often the only thing you changed were a handful of sentences.
The parallel isn't perfect. Fiction has to do things that a GOV.UK page doesn't — it has to create atmosphere, develop character, earn emotional responses. But the instinct to locate yourself in the reader's (or character's) position before you start writing is the same instinct. It's one thing that content design built into me through sheer repetition, to the point I didn't notice, until I took a step back.
The intolerance for dead sentences
Plain language training makes you impatient with sentences that aren't doing anything.
In content design, a sentence that doesn't help the user complete their task is a sentence that shouldn't exist. The standard isn't, 'is this well-written?', it's 'is this necessary?'.
A sentence can be grammatically correct, stylistically competent, and serve no useful purpose, whatsoever. It can be a sentence that restates what the previous sentence already established. It can be a sentence that describes something the reader can infer. It can be a sentence that exists simply because the writer wasn't sure how to get to the next paragraph. In content design, you learn to spot those on sight. In fiction, that same eye is what separates a clean draft from a padded one.
The writers I find hardest to read are usually not bad writers in any technical sense. They're writers who never developed that intolerance. Every sentence is considered, some are even beautiful, but there are thirty pages where twenty would do, and you, as a reader, feel the drag without always knowing why.