Ditch the Persona and Find Your Muse
If you find yourself creatively stuck, try this Vonnegut-inspired tactic.
If you work in marketing and media long enough, you're bound to encounter a buyer persona.
Buyer personas are like scouting reports on your target audience. They typically sound something like this: "SALLY is a 30-year-old mom who drives a Subaru, lives in Chicago, makes $70K a year, and wants help overcoming the challenges of balancing her work and family responsibilities."
Besides supplying the info we need to give some AI hellbot to target Sally with Instagram ads for crap she'll regret buying, personas are designed to help the creative process. They teach us about our ideal customer.
This is based on a long-established idea about creativity: It's best to have a person in mind when you're creating. As Kurt Vonnegut once said, "Please write for one person. Open the window and make love to the world, so to speak, and your story will get pneumonia."
Is that a weird freaking quote? Yes. Yes, it really is. But it's also true. When you write for everyone, you write for no one. When you write for one person, it’s absolutely inspiring.
But here's the thing that's troubled me ever since I saw my first brand persona document at the tender age of 22: Most of them are useless from a creative perspective.
The persona problem
Most personas fall short because they don't help you develop empathy for the audience. Sure, you get their age, 3-5 bullet points on their challenges and aspirations, a random stock photo, and a weird codename like “The Milleniator." Maybe ChatGPT secretly develops empathy from that, but humans do not.
Empathy is crucial. The reason that “writing for one person" works is because it's an act of empathy. You're think of someone who epitomizes your audience and ask: What can I create that will help them? Teach them something new? Entertain them? Or even both? How can I help them see the world in a new way and experience wonder?
Empathy is strongly linked with oxytocin production, which in turn boosts dopamine in the brain. And, oh boy, does the brain feel creative on dopamine — the feel good neurotransmitter that we spend our lives chasing, along with its sidekick, serotonin. Boosting dopamine is the greatest creativity hack we've discovered so far.
That's why if we really want to tell great stories, we don't need sterile personas. What we need is a muse.
What the hell is a muse?
I didn't really know what a muse was until I hit a creative wall and finally read Steven Pressfield's War of Art, which has been recommended to me as a creative bible by every person I know who fetishizes their own creativity.
Pressfield explains that the muses come from Greek mythology. They were the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, and the term "muse" translates to “memory". Their entire job was to inspire artists (each muse was responsible for a different type of art). Even 2,800 years ago, the ancient Greeks understood that creating for someone specific inspires creativity.
A muse turns writing from a solitary activity into a social one. They're with us all the time. When our brain internalizes the muse, it starts to do a ton of creative work in the background. When we're in the shower. When we're on long walks. When we're lying down to sleep at night. Our brain makes connections and comes up with stories the muse will love.
How to find your muse
You can't find your muse in a Powerpoint deck.
You find your muse in stories — by talking and listening to your audience as much as possible and hearing their stories.
I was reminded of this recently when I started speaking at a lot of events again, and ramping up interviews for my new book. Almost every day, I spend time with my core audience of marketers, entrepreneurs, and creatives — either talking to them on the record or drinking with them off the record at happy hour. (Where you get to hear the real real stories.)
Before long, I realized that my sense of my muse had faded over the past few months, but as I listened to their stories, challenges, and aspirations, my muse returned, brighter than ever.
If you want to crack open your creativity, just spend time with the people you want to create for. Go to industry events — even if that Netflix button is so tempting and you really don’t want to change out of sweatpants. (If you live in the middle of nowhere, join virtual communities and jump into the Zoom discussion.) DM people you admire and ask to interview them for a story; you’ll be shocked by how few people say no. Listen closely to their stories until their dreams and fears start to feel like your own.
Do this enough, and the work will come easier. Your mind will start to make connections and come up with ideas that truly help your audience. You'll create for that one specific person but end up reaching thousands. You'll start to notice a spark of inspiration that wasn't there before.
And before you know it, you'll find your muse.
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Chart of the Week
Want AI to cite your brand? Get in Wikipedia, Reddit, and Forbes. I’m going to do a deep dive on AI search later this month as part of my Q3 ‘25 State of Marketing Report, but one obvious conclusion I’ve made is that PR is going to be the future of SEO.
If you want to get cited by LLMs, you need to be featured in authoritative websites. An article that you publish on Forbes has WAY more value than anything you publish on your own site. PR is back, baby!
Profound broke down the share of citations for every major brand — check it out.
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I’m the Fractional CMO at Pepper and the best-selling author of The Storytelling Edge. Subscribe for free to get new storytelling and audience-building strategies in your inbox each week.
Hey Joe, thanks for the prompt to go beyond personas and write for the "one", both in my professional and personal writing!
I really like this framing. It’s a great way to approach the work when you feel unsure of where to start.