What B2B Writers Can Learn from Fiction’s Free Thinkers

Modern advertising, especially in the B2B space, and modern literature may seem worlds apart, but that might just be a trick of perspective. Don Draper reading Frank O’Hara looks cool, but it’s a far cry from today’s data-driven approach to life in ad land.

But is there anything B2B writers learn from fiction’s greatest minds?

After all, taking tips and tricks from the great and good of the local library feels akin to playing fantasy football with players from past generations.

Would Sophocles have written quality email campaigns? Would Hemingway’s take on a social post have driven leads? Could George Eliot write a bottom-of-the funnel product-centric eBook? I expect the answers are: no, yes, and probably not (unless it was about textile machinery).

It seems anathema that avant-garde literary figures and B2B wordsmiths have much crossover. But even though the audiences may be different, the lessons can still be applied to break free from predictable marketing tropes and capture an audience hungry for originality.

Cormac McCarthy – Own a writing style that’s inimitable.

AI is being heralded as the death knell of writing. It can imitate, impersonate, and improve whatever a human can do. ChatGPT can generate a white paper in seconds. Midjourney can produce pictures in a heartbeat. However, AI can only mimic what already exists. If your style is your own, unique even, then it will stand out from the crowd of copycats.

Cormac McCarthy’s prose is a mix of mathematical precision and musicality, loquaciously logical, a grammarless grace that produces a unique atmosphere for the reader. It’s utterly incomparable, entirely AI-proof. It’s this originality – irrelevant of the time, topic, or torture being described – that makes it impossible for AI (or anyone else) to duplicate successfully.

Simple B2B Takeaway: Embrace the weirdness. When your work has a distinct tone of voice, it will have a greater impact.

Kurt Vonnegut – Blend media forms

Kurt Vonnegut began experimenting with the classic literary form in ways previously unseen. Way back in the 1960s, he knew that people get bored easily, especially when confronted with a wall of text. He proved that just because it’s a novel doesn’t mean it has to be solely words on a page. Just because it’s an eBook doesn’t mean it needs to be copy from cover to cover. There’s no reason why you can’t incorporate drawings into your story or include videos or graphics into your B2B copy.

Humans tired of the repetitive, and our attention span is only atrophying with each emerging app. Even the most ardent of tech-focused, product specialist can’t enjoy the prospect of sitting down to read an entire brochure on the minutiae of their working world. They too want to enjoy what they’re reading.

Integrating a variety of media formats creates something more than the sum of its parts. It’s also just more interesting to read. And write. Can you integrate a more dynamic, interactive form of storytelling? Can you convert a copy doc into multimedia, multisensory marketing? Your reader will thank you for it.

Simple B2B Takeaway: Creating multimedia work keeps you from falling victim to today’s vanishing attention spans.

Ursula le Guin – World-building matters, even in B2B

Ursula le Guin excelled at creating immersive, fantasy environments that a reader could escape into. The lesson here is that the world you create is as detailed and dense as you’re willing to allow it to be. Whether that’s a fantasy world exploring the philosophical limits of power, or a research paper on the trends set to impact a particular sector of work, the audience will dive into it as deeply as the oxygen of your writing lets them.

World-building isn’t just for fantasy. From crafting brand narratives to product messaging, the ability to create a compelling, absorbing reality is what sets your writing apart. Language is power, and how you wield it can elevate even the driest technical document into a compelling read.

Simple B2B takeaway: All writing exists within a specific world, even if it’s the world around your brand, product, or service.

Robert Caro – Research, diligence, and subject matter expertise is what separates you.

If there’s a Mount Rushmore of non-fiction writers, Robert Caro would be all four faces. His excellence stems from a guiding mantra: make the reader turn every page. And the way you do this is by digging deeper into the research and source materials than anyone else has previously had the patience to do.

How you talk about something is much more important than what you are saying. Especially when you can humanise it. But to find those stories, you need to be able to tease them out of the experts involved. To have something to say, you first need a person with a point to make.

By uncovering the data no one else has, by getting the stories no one else has heard, and by getting the quotes that cut against the grain, you can find a whole different side to a story someone might already think they know.

It’s how a book about a man building roads in New York becomes a Greek tragedy about the fall of a civilisation. Or how a white paper on cybersecurity can become a tale about people’s relationship with technology. Just as long as you’re willing to do the research properly.

Simple B2B Takeaway: The difference is always, always, in the details

Make the abnormal the everyday.

B2B campaigns should be weird. Or, at least, they should be different enough to turn heads. In an industry often dismissed as 'dry', there's enormous potential to create ideas that truly move people.

By embracing the lessons of literary free thinking, the work you create can buzzsaw through the forest of mundane, AI-generated ‘content’, and redefine the boundaries of what B2B writing can be.