Magazine Articles 101--Generating Ideas

So, I got another rejection delivered hot and fresh to my inbox today. Sigh….only…. about 75 to go before I break ol’ Stephen King’s record.  Trying to keep it positive. For the record, these are different things I’m sending out that are being rejected, it’s not the same thing over and over. Glad we cleared that up.

This new adventure of magazine article writing is… well, it’s maddening and fun at the same time. I thought I would write a little about the process and what I am learning as I am chugging along. Today I am going to talk about generating ideas for articles.

Read the magazines! If you are going to write for a magazine, this is an important first step. You need to be familiar with the audience so that your article works for the tone, reader level, and point of view of the magazine. Many magazines have online articles you can read, or they send sample copies for free or cheap.

Do the Twist:  Look at newspapers and magazines and see if there’s a spin you can put on articles they are running. Maybe something local can be cultivated into a national story, or vice versa. I’ve seen articles that I’ve read online, suddenly pop up in the local news as, well, “news”—this ticks me off to no end, because these folks are supposedly journalists and are being paid to WRITE, not to troll the ‘net for stories. Do better than that. Find a twist--an angle--that makes your story unique. The upside to this method—you can capitalize on the buzz the topic is already generating. The downside—by the time you’ve read the story, thought up the angle, done the research, and written the story, the buzz may have fluttered away to some other trendy topic. It behooves you to either write quickly, or make sure your story idea has staying power and isn’t all buzz.

Let Us All Press On: You can glean information from press releases sent out by organizations, as well as reports from government websites. If you have an interest in anything, from PETA to child welfare issues, subscribe to the organizational newsletter and let the ideas find you.

Brainstorm. Literally sit and start coming up with whatever you think of. Let your mind wander (as long as your pen follows so you can scribble down topics or gibberish that may become topics). Often, getting everything in your head on paper can open the floodgates and suddenly you’re drowning in great ideas!

Idea Charts/Mind Mapping/Graphic Organizer:  This is the idea of visual aids to help your creativity. I won’t go into the specifics, but you can find resources here and here. The gist is that the visual aspect helps your brain to organize and channel its creativity. An added bonus is that often it will help you to organize and outline for the story while you are generating the idea.

Everywhere! Yup, I said it. You can get ideas from everywhere. The one place you CANNOT get ideas from is while banging your head on the keyboard because the ideas aren’t coming. Except for that one article idea I just got about the sharp increase in emergency room visits for laptop-key-from-forehead-ectomies among the author demographic. But really—the best way to get ideas is to get out there and chase them. I know in my own experience, I tend to wait for my muse to download ideas into my brain. This works often with the creative storytelling aspect of my writing. However, if I am to write articles as a business, I need to have a steady fountain of ideas to query to magazines, and this means that a part of my day, every day, needs to be idea generation.

I’m putting a couple of links below to some resources for idea generation. The internet is full of articles like this, but these were two that I really liked.

I want to hear from you:  what do YOU do to generate story/article/book ideas?

http://www.writing-world.com/basics/where.shtml

http://www.writersdigest.com/writing-articles/by-writing-goal/improve-my-writing/thou_shalt_steal

Writing is WORK!

At first glance, the title of this post is a big fat ol’ “DUH!” Of course writing is work. I’m not saying that as if it was a surprise. I’m actually trying to announce to the world that I am, once again, trying to write for money instead of just for the pleasure/need of it. For those who don’t know me (most of you), you don’t know that I spend over a year trying to navigate the content mills/freelance sites/elance, guru, etc. trying to scrape together a living with my writing skills. I completely failed.

OR DID I?  Really, I didn’t fail any more than every other writer does who tries to do what I did.  Elance.com, Guru.com, all of those sites—they are a total scam. They legitimately set up contract services with writers and clients, but their culture is one of earning maybe a few dollars per article. If you take the time to research and write something that contains complete sentences and cohesive thought and structure, you will earn, maybe a dollar an hour. Supposedly, you can build a portfolio and start charging more, but with so many people offering to write for clients for just a few dollars, you really cannot move up. So, it was no longer an option.  That and the time that a client insisted I change an article to be grammatically incorrect and quite frankly nonsensical, just to include a keyword that wasn’t really a word.

So, here’s the work I am doing now. Magazine articles. Short stories. Poems. I am getting back to the heart and soul of what I write. I will NEVER, EVER, EVER write another article about zodiac tattoos—well, I may, but it won’t be at .05 cents a word (you heard me, a half a cent per word!) 

I am being creative again with my writing. I’m putting my heart into my writing again.

I just wrote a short story about Winston Churchill for a kid’s magazine. It was important enough to me to get it to them, that I spend sixty bucks to overnight it in order to meet the query deadline. I researched and learned about Sir Winston, and wrote historical fiction for the first time in my life. I actually gained quite an admiration for Churchill, based on how he acted as a younger man (think Indiana Jones fighting the Germans). I wrote another short story for a kids’ religious magazine and sent it off.  After this blog entry is done, I plan to maybe do a little revising on my middle-grade (MYSTIC MARBLE), or I may start gathering and editing a book of poetry for submission to a publisher who is running a contest specifically for poetry books.

What is my point? Well, I am working hard, for one. My family is slowly, oh so slowly, learning that they need to not bother me so much when I am “at the desk.” Right now, the TV is so incredibly loud in the other room, but we’re taking baby steps. If I am going to contribute to the family budget, I will have to submit, submit, submit, write, write, write—sheer volume will have to make up for the fact that everything I write won’t be purchased.

The big takeaway, though, is that I am writing with passion again. It’s work, but it’s good work, not mindless, sweatshop, slave labor breaking rocks with an icepick.

Please, if you ever, for a moment, consider looking for work on Elance, Guru, Examiner.com, any of those things, just…. don’t. It’s not worth your time and energy if you’re not putting your passion into the work (I have written just a few things that I’ve been able to point at and say that I was writing with passion. Surprise, surprise, those are the SAME few things that my clients actually gave me writing credits to… coincidence? You decide….). Don’t let the content mills suck your brain and your creative passion dry. Find clients who value the work you do, and pay you what you are worth. They are out there. The avenues are out there, be they content services that pay in real money, not Monopoly money, or if it be through freelancing for magazines.  You are worth it. You really are.

What about you? Have you had experiences with freelance writing? Horror stories? Happy stories? What’s your take on content writing?