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?
