Your first conversation with Claude (it's just talking).

The first time I opened Claude, I sat there for a full minute wondering what to type. I'd been reading about "prompts" for months and I'd built up this idea in my head that I had to say something clever, or technical, or in a particular format. I stared at the blinking cursor. I typed "hello". I deleted it. I felt ridiculous.

Here's what I want you to know, because it took me embarrassingly long to figure it out: there is no special way to talk to it. It's not a search engine. It's not a command line. It's a box you write sentences into, like you're writing to a well-read friend who has quite a lot of time on her hands.

Just ask the thing you actually want

The best first conversations I've seen from people at my workshops look almost exactly like this:

I need to write a polite but firm email to a tenant who's late on rent for the second month in a row. I don't want to sound like a landlord in a Dickens novel. Can you have a go?

That's it. That's the whole prompt. Notice what's in there: the situation, what you want, and a clue about the tone. No preamble, no "act as a professional email copywriter," no bullet-point instructions. Just a sentence a real person would say to another real person.

Claude will have a go. It'll be pretty good, probably. Then -- and this is the bit most people miss -- you can just reply. "A bit warmer please, she's been a good tenant for three years." "Can you take out the bit about the late fee, I'm going to waive it this time." "Now shorter."

The conversation is the product

This is the one idea I'd like you to leave this post with, because everything else flows from it. The first thing Claude gives you is almost never the thing you actually wanted. It's a first draft, and it's for you to react to. Saying "hmm, not quite, more like this..." is not a failure of prompting. It is the prompting.

I think people get stuck because they're used to Google. With Google you type a thing, you get a page of blue links, and you try again with different words if it didn't work. With Claude, you don't start over. You keep going.

Three small things worth trying tonight

If you only have ten minutes and a cup of tea, here are three conversations to start. None of them require any setup beyond going to claude.ai and signing in.

• "Help me tidy up this email." Paste in one you've been putting off. Tell it what you want to sound like.
• "I'm trying to decide between X and Y. Ask me the questions I should be thinking about." Beautifully useful. You'll be surprised.
• "Explain [thing I pretend to understand] to me like I'm reasonably clever but have no background." Pick something from the news. Make it earn the conversation.

That's genuinely it. You don't need a course, a book, or a subscription to anything fancier than the free tier. You need twenty minutes and something you actually want to get done.

Next week I'll write about the five small habits that turned Claude from "thing I use occasionally" into "tab that's open all day." In the meantime, have a go, and if you get stuck, reply to the newsletter and tell me what happened. I read all of them.