He talked for 11 minutes. Then took two hours to write four sentences.
You can talk about your work for eleven minutes flat. Then you sit down to write and lose four sentences in two hours. That's not a writing problem.
I watched a founder talk for eleven minutes last Thursday.
He explained his entire methodology to me over coffee. Not at me. To me. He used both his hands. He laughed at his own bad joke about pension funds. He did the bit where he leans forward and says “and here’s where it gets weird,” and it actually got weird. It was good. It was the best version of him I’d seen all month.
Then he went home and tried to write a 200 word LinkedIn post about the same idea.
He spent two hours on it. He wrote four sentences. He deleted three. The remaining sentence read like the FAQ on a SaaS website.
He sent it to me with a note: “I think I’ve just lost the ability to write.”
He hasn’t. None of you have.
You haven’t lost anything. You’ve been told for 25 years that “writing” means a specific shape. The shape has rules. The rules say: no contractions, no opinions in the first paragraph, no jokes near the headline, no admitting you don’t know something, no ending a sentence with the word “yet.”
So when you sit down to write a post, you reach for that shape automatically. The shape is what your last manager rewarded you for. The shape is what got you on the executive committee. The shape is the one you cannot turn off because you wrote a thousand versions of it before lunch every day for two decades.
The shape is fine. It works in a board pack. It does not work on the page when you’re trying to be a person.
This is the bit I want you to hear properly….
You don’t have a voice problem.
You have a container problem.
Your voice is the 11 minute coffee. The board-pack shape is the container you keep pouring it into. The voice is fine. The container is the wrong shape for the liquid. The result is what looks, sounds, and reads like beige. Not because you’re a bad writer. Because you’ve put a working voice into a container designed for a different job.
(I should know. I spent six months last year accidentally writing my own posts in a container shaped exactly like a corporate exec summary. I am supposed to be the person who knows about this. The container is sneaky. It comes for everyone.)
Here’s the test.
Read the last three things you published. Out loud. Hand on heart. Did any of them sound like the version of you that explains your work over a flat white? If yes, brilliant, keep going, you’re already most of the way out. If no, you don’t need a writing course. You need a different container.
The new container has three traits. It is shorter than you think. It has a real opinion in it. It uses the specific noun rather than the category noun. Not “founders,” but “the founder I had coffee with on Thursday.” Not “the industry,” but “the four blokes I worked with at PwC who all said the same thing in 2019.” Specifics. Always specifics.
That’s the fix in a sentence. Stop trying to write better. Start putting the working voice into a container shaped like a person, not like a slide deck.
Next newsletter I’m going to name the seven specific reasons your existing content reads as a stranger. The structural ones. The ghostwriter ones. The “I filled in a brand questionnaire” ones. If you’ve ever opened your own LinkedIn and felt nothing, that’s the diagnostic.
For this weekend the work is smaller.
Find one paragraph from your last six months of content that you genuinely don’t recognise. Just one. Stick it in a doc. Underneath it, write what you’d actually say if you were explaining the same idea to a friend in a kitchen. Don’t post it. Don’t fix it. Just look at the gap.
That gap is the work. Everything I write here for the next ninety days is going to keep pointing at it.
Welcome back. Or welcome in. Either way.
Sarra, The Ghost 👻
If you want a second pair of eyes on the gap, I run a Voice Audit. One memo. One diagnostic. One path forward. → DM me for a flash audit.