Where Freelancers Find Ideas—The Writer’s Eye

Some freelancers write for companies, writing whatever they need. Sometimes it’s dry and corporate. Sometimes it’s advertorial. But many prefer to write on ideas of their choosing, ideas that feel more organic and interesting and especially important.

(How to Manage the Submission Process as a Freelance Writer.)

A lot of fresh writers stick to writing what they know, only a lot of times they cannot put a finger on what exactly they know enough of to write about. This is called learning to develop a writer’s eye.

Start off by mining what you know. As a freelance writer and a conference presenter, I invariably run into writers starting out who claim their lives are nothing special and they have nothing pertinent in their lives to write about. I avow that I can sit down with each person and mine their life and send them in a dozen directions with topic ideas.

Let’s say you are particularly green at this endeavor. With pen in hand, let’s mine your life. Identify yourself using the following categories. Take your time and think hard.

GenderAgeMarital StatusFamily StatusPetsGeography/residenceNeighborsAncestry/parents & grandparentsEducationHealthReligionEthnicityEmployment (past and present)HobbiesSportsTravel historyFinancial status/interestsHome interestsCommunity interestsOnline interestsReading interests

In this exercise you probably post facts, not feelings. That’s normal. But once you’ve taken the time to study yourself by listing the details, return to the list from another level and state how each has impacted your life in some manner, good or badly.

Not only are you learning to dig, maybe even learning how to interview at an elementary level, but you are training your beginner’s writer’s eye to see beyond the obvious, the tangible, and expected.

You are giving meaning to life. To everything in life.

During this exercise, you might glean a dozen ideas for good articles. Some of these will feel more like personal essay, maybe good Chicken Soup for the Soul submissions, but delve deeper into the importance of these answers, and how some angle of each of them could make a decent investigative piece, human interest piece, or interview, or provide the basic groundwork for an important how-to article.

Other methods in mining yourself:

Turn to people who know you, both personal and professional, and ask them about your strengths and what they feel you are knowledgeable about.Name your worst experiences and what you learned from them or how did you turn them around.Name the top five pivotal moments in your life, and what you learned from them. What did others around you learn from them?Practice turning every action and event in your life into a lesson, a how-to, an example, or an awakening.Practice writing a 300-word motivational piece in your journal every morning.

Now, let’s turn this around and make you look outside of yourself, into the happenings of your day-to-day life. What did you hear about, read about, or experience that merited a story? Not a regurgitation of what you saw or heard, but a fresh angle on it. That’s what you are attempting to develop, an eye that takes in one thing and repaints it as something more.

For instance, I once had a landscaper in my yard, laying out an irrigation system. He was old school, even wearing a long white beard and wide-brimmed straw hat, a summertime Santa. My eye had already noted the character, so I studied him further. He began teaching my husband how the system works, and how to make adjustments on his own. They both got on one knee, and his hand gestures were gentle. Then he made the comment about how his supplier was “the law” in the area, and the best in the state.

I published three stories from that one experience. One went to a landscaping magazine about how to talk to a client as a landscaper. Another was an interview of his supplier, with me using his words to come up with the title “WP Law is the Law of Irrigation.” Then in the interview I learned they constructed the grand majority of commercial fountains in the state, and I wrote a piece on those.

I wrote a piece on my own experience with discrimination and published it in an Equal Employment Opportunity career newsletter. My teenage son struggled with college, and I published a piece in a college publication on where students can find assistance on college campuses when they think they’ve lost their way both physically and mentally. One of my employees was a mail clerk with mental limitations, and I wrote an admiring piece on his unique adaptations and accomplishments.

Before long, I learned to mine not just myself but life as a whole. Every single thing that I saw, heard, smelled, felt, or came across became fodder. The key was taking the topic and remolding it for ingenuity, uniqueness, and appeal to an editor, which came from researching magazines, blogs, and newsletters and understanding their voices.

That writer’s eye soon gravitated to columns, giving me a theme or two to keep an eye out for in my day-to-day life. I became a hammer, and everyone I saw and everyplace I stood, I hunted for nails. My eye turned into a radar for story ideas.

It’s a talent you develop, but the skill takes honing. Start a writer’s journal, a place you can keep impromptu notes. Every day for two weeks, note at least three items that might make for a good story. Develop the habit of not only carrying the notebook, but also writing in it. The consistency of noting your surroundings comes after continuous practice. The depth will increase over time. Your unusual twists of a topic will come as well.

To a journalist, everything is a breaking story. To a doctor, everything is health-related. To a teacher, everything is educationally driven. To you, the freelancer writer, everything holds potential for an article, and your daily existence holds more wealth than you could ever imagine. Your writing opportunities will grow, but the best side-effect of all this is that you’ll appreciate the details of your life even more.