There are two questions I’m asked most often when people find out I am a freelance writer:
1) Where do your ideas come from? and
2) Do you come up with the ideas or do they tell you what to write?
Clever observers playing along at home will note that this is actually the same question.
The truth is that when you’re starting out, the ideas come from you. Nobody will tell you what to write if they have no idea who you are, what you’re capable of producing or whether you’ll even get the story in – let alone on time.
These days, I do a combination of stories that I’m asked to write and stories that I come up with. I’m still always on the hunt for a story idea.
My friend Alex Brooks and I once organised our thoughts enough to present a workshop on freelance writing at a conference. This is what we came up with for ideas:
“With magazines, newspapers and websites there are ideas and ideas. New ideas based on changes in society, newsworthy events, scientific breakthroughs.
Then there are stock ideas done in new ways – an example here might be a breast cancer story – every October, in support of Pink Ribbon month, most Australian women’s mags run some kind of related story. The trick is to present material that might be familiar to a reader in a new way.
Presented with this challenge one year, I suggested that we do a story on the ways in which men cope when their partners are diagnosed – it created a lot of reader interest and comment.
So where do they come from?
From the news, from reading other mags, from talking to friends and family (if a subject comes up over and over, chances are there’s a story in it), from looking at what a particular mag has run previously, from movies, from the internet, from professional associations (archicentre or housing industry association, for instance, if it’s homes stories that interest you), from your life experience (renovations, babies, marriage etc), from the ether.
As with fiction writing, it’s a good idea to carry a notebook and jot down possible stories so you don’t forget.”
Are you new here? Welcome to my blog! I’m Allison Tait and you can find out more about me here and more about my online writing courses here.
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