Being a bid writer means carrying a lot of responsibility on your shoulders – or in this case, your fingers. A whole project depends on your ideas and the ways in which you can present your ideas in writing. The project might be excellent, the planned execution of the project might be well detailed, well planned to the T, but unless you manage to show that in your bid, the project might never take off. However, while that makes bid writing a great responsibility, it does not mean that it cannot be done successfully. What you need is great focus, and a high level of flexibility and willingness to improve upon your work until it is persuasive, simple, and highly informative. Below, we have several tips which can help you achieve this.

1. Be a team player

Here is the thing – writing is team work. Great novels might seem to have been written by a single person, but if you check a novel’s acknowledgment section, you will see that the writer thanks numerous people who have helped him/her in various ways. This is even more pronounced in bid writing. You need to be a team player. Include members of your team (even if you’re the only writer on the team) in the writing process. Do not seclude yourself in isolation – attend storyboard meetings if you can, it is a must, because you need to know everything about the project, and even the smallest detail can be important in writing.

2. Brainstorm

Create an outline, or simply brainstorm ideas about what you need to include in the bid, and make sure to not miss anything. Get another person from your team on it, and work together in throwing around ideas and possibilities before you start the writing process. You don’t even have to open up a document – just use a notebook. You’re not looking for organization, you’re looking for ideas and musings which might be important, or might be discarded completely. This is the reason why you need another person to do this with you, because if something is really important and you’re not able to grasp it, your teammate will and vice versa. As previously stated, great bids are the work of a great team, rather than an isolated writer.

3. Write continuously

You need the time to write. This is easy to achieve if you’re not working on other projects. However, you might have other tasks in your line of work, and they might take up a lot of time. So make sure to adjust your schedule, depending on the time you have to write the bid, and clear as many hours per day as you can and reserve them for writing. Additionally, use your brainstorming notes, and just write in broad strokes. If you reach a spot you might need to leave blank due to lack of information – don’t fret, but continue writing. The goal is to create the skeleton of your bid, to create a piece which will tell you what you yet need to discover about the project, and which you can later polish to perfection.

4. Ask for information

Once you’ve finished the first draft of your bid, and have found that you’re missing some key information, don’t be reluctant to ask for it from your bid director or other members of your team. On the other hand, if you’ve had all the information, and your first draft includes everything that needed to be included, ask others for their opinion. They might feel you need to include something else, and even if they don’t, getting a second opinion before polishing your work is beneficial, because you will know beforehand what you need to pay attention to and focus on in order to make the bid perfect.

5. Polish your work

Editing is the most important step in writing anything – be it a bid, a novel, a short story or an article. Everything you’ve read on paper and on the internet has probably gone through numerous edits in order to be as perfect as it can be. Your bid needs the same treatment to shine. Remember, in the previous step, you created the first draft of your bid, and you need a second, a third, or even more, to make it perfect, because a whole project depends on it. Also, make sure you do not sound too formal in the writing, but keep it simple and not too passionate, because that is off putting and it will make your project seem unprofessional.

Image credit: Pixabay

Georgina Roy wants to live in a world filled with magic. As an art student, she’s moonlighting as a writer and is content to fill notebooks and sketchbooks with magical creatures and amazing new worlds. When she is not at school, or scribbling away in a notebook, you can usually find her curled up, reading a good urban fantasy novel, or writing on her laptop, trying to create her own.