Making Money as a Freelance Writer
Tips on How to Brainstorm Ideas for Magazine Stories
Oct 26, 2009
Many writers dream of becoming a freelance writer, but don’t know where to start. Brainstorming ideas is a great place to begin. Look at your hobbies, professional achievements, your children’s activities, and other interests you may have.
Here are a Few ideas to Get Started:
- jobs you’ve held
- unusual occupations held by friends
- special interests (i.e., aromatherapy)
- things you are passionate about Hobbies (i.e., model aircraft building)
Write down at least two ideas from each sub-heading you’ve noted, then expand on those ideas. For instance, if you decided on ‘Parenting’ as your topic, you may have sub-topics similar to these:
- Behavioural Issues
- Nutrition
- Playtime
- Starting School
You will then expand on each of your sub-topics, like this:
Behavioural Issues:
- Setting rules
- Star charts/incentives
- Behavioural problems
- Domestic violence
- How marriage break up effects behaviour
Nutrition:
- Finicky eaters
- Providing a variety of foods
- Removing distractions during mealtimes
- Forcing children to eat
This list will be the basis of your research, and help you get started with your freelance career. Understand these are only loose topics at this point, and you will build on these to break into suitable magazines.
Now that you’ve written the above ideas, you’ll need to go deeper into the topic. What sort of information could you include?
Here are a Few ideas Using Behavioural Issues as the Basis:
- Setting Rules – have a family meeting and set rules
- Consequences – what consequences will apply for breaking the rules?
- Incentives - will incentives help? (i.e. Lucky dip at the end of the week)
- Case studies with real families – find two families with totally different results from using rules/incentives/consequences
- Quotes from experts – find an expert to interview on this subject
What you see above is basically an outline for the article. The most productive writers are organized writers, and outlining articles before writing begins will help you with your organisation.
Doing this provides a guide, and ensures the articles will keep on track. Your outline will also guide you with the article word-count. Most feature articles will have a length of 1500–2000 words, but it could be more or less. This will depend on the publication involved.
Last but not least, you will need to come up with an appropriate title. It needs to be self-explanatory, otherwise readers may be confused about the purpose of the article. (Tip: Editors will often change the title, but you still need to ensure your title is appealing. Titles do help sell articles.) This article could be called Kids Behaving Badly: Stop them in their Tracks!
Here’s your challenge: brainstorm some topics and expand them in the same way as shown above. Outline and complete an article as if you were submitting it to a magazine. This will give you first-hand experience and ultimately prepare you to write for magazines.
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