Welcome to Contentment

Hey good folks and happy Thursday!

It’s my Friday today! I have a few old college friends coming into town to romp around and I can’t wait! 

In the meantime, Claude still has me so incredibly excited. Let’s dive in!

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I’ve only been playing with Claude for the last week, now that I’ve got enterprise access, and I am obsessed. The quality of work I’m getting from it is light years ahead of ChatGPT, and its ability (and speed!) at creating skills has me floored. 

Those skills have me producing decks and strategy one-pagers on brand and in the right format 90% of the time. The amount of time it is saving me, the good ideas it produces, and how well it rewrites otherwise very bland and clearly AI-written first drafts is amazing. 

Here’s one skill I built that I’m particularly obsessed with: the story-arc-rewriter. 

This skill rewrites existing content to be more engaging for human audiences by applying proven story arc structures. In it, I’ve built out 6 different emotional story arcs in a format like this:

• Shape: Steady upward climb
• Emotional trajectory: Low → High
• Core feeling: Hope, aspiration, triumph
• Why it works: Mirrors the human desire for upward progress. Readers experience vicarious achievement. Activates hope and optimism.
• Best for content about: Success stories, product transformations, customer journeys, tutorials that build mastery, company origin stories, "how we built this" narratives, before/after case studies
• Weakness: Can feel predictable or one-note without complication. Less popular than arcs with more movement.
• Literary examples: Cinderella, Pride and Prejudice, The Pursuit of Happyness, Matilda
• Popularity ranking: Lower — readers prefer more complex emotional movement

I’ve also mapped specific narrative arcs, like this:

• Pattern: Ordinary world → Call to adventure → Trials → Transformation → Return
• Maps to emotional shape: Cinderella arc
• Why it works: Mirrors the universal human experience of growth through challenge. Joseph Campbell identified this pattern across all cultures and eras.
• Best for content about: Customer transformation stories, founder journeys, product adoption journeys ("before our product, during onboarding struggles, after mastery"), learning curves, career transitions
• Key elements to include: The call (the problem or opportunity), the threshold (the decision to act), the ordeal (the hardest challenge), the reward (the transformation)

And finally, 4 character arcs, like this:

• Movement: Starts with a flawed worldview → overcomes flaw → embraces truth
• The reader journey: "I used to think X, but now I understand Y"
• Best for content about: Educational content, myth-busting, paradigm shifts, "everything you thought you knew about X is wrong," product education that changes buyer behavior
• Why it works: The reader undergoes the same transformation as the protagonist, making the lesson personal and memorable.

Finally, the skill helped me map all of this back to our content types so it knows which arcs to use for which pieces of content.

If you’re anything like me, you are getting a ton of first drafts from your team (not your content team, your larger team) that are clearly written by AI and need a lot of cleaning up. This story arc skill is one of the first I use to do that––restructuing the story to something that feels more exciting or interesting. And then, of course, I go through and apply the brand and product skills. 

Finally, over here at Klabviyo, everything still goes through a human edit before going live. Because despite all the skills, and how impressed I am with Claude, humans still catch way more than the AI does. And their final edit is critical. 

As always, I’d love to know how you are using AI! Simply email back and let me know!

A NOTE ON THIS ADVICE

You do you! 

One content marketer’s best practices aren’t always right for another one, though I do try to distill out the main concepts and core practices I believe everyone can benefit from. That said, you must use good judgment when deciding whether to take advice given from folks on the internet. I am an expert, and this advice comes from my direct experience, but I am not smarter than you, and I have nothing to gain or lose because of what you do.

THINGS KEEPING ME CONTENT

• What I’m listening to: Rainbow Kitten Surprise! Just went to their concert in Austin last night. And it was wonderful. 
• What I’m wearing: I’m back on my curly hair game ever since investing in some Roz products. Highly recommend! 
• What I’m eating: A wonderful Greek omelet at a little Greek coffee shop near me. My only complaint is that the side salad it came with has fruit in it. Noooo, thank you! 

Thank you so much for reading. Let me know what you think by replying to this email.

Very excited to be here with y’all. 

Tracey

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