Like many freelancers, you probably made a goal to sell more stories in 2011, and one key element to meeting this goal is having stories to tell. And like many freelancers right about now, you’re probably scratching your head wondering how the heck to find these stories. Maybe everything you’re coming up with feels tired and old … done to death. Boring and uninteresting. Or worst of all, you’re coming up with nothing. Zip. Zilch. And if you keep going at this rate, that’s exactly what you’ll have in your checking account come March or April.
Last year I gave a talk to freelancers called “Five Tips to Finding Story Ideas That Sell” and it seemed to strike a chord with them. Here are the tips in a nutshell. If you’d like to work one-on-one with me to learn how to generate story ideas effortlessly — ideas that actually sell to editors – sign up for my Become an Idea Machine workshop that starts on January 17, 2011 (that’s next week!) Some of my students have gone on to sell stories they developed in my class to places like the New York Times, Discover, Yankee, Parenting, The New Scientist, and more.
1. Memorize the phrase “That would make a great story.” Whenever I’m talking to my friends, mother, kid’s pediatrician, or a person buying bread ahead of me in line, chances are good I’m weighing the conversation in my mind and wondering if there’s some kind of story I could sell to an editor. It’s sick, I know! If my friend is poring her heart out to me about her cheating under-employed husband who just cleaned out her checking account, of course I’m there to comfort her and give her advice as a friend, but the writer in me is thinking, “Wow, I can’t believe my smart, well-educated friend ended up with such a loser. This is the third time this week I’ve heard about smart women ending up with dud husbands. I wonder if a women’s magazine would be interested in a piece about smart women marrying down. Is this a trend?” I’ll be frank: much of the time, the ideas I come up with this way I don’t use, because they’d violate a confidence or just aren’t that interesting to me. The real takeaway here is that I’ve trained myself to be present as a writer (not just a friend/mother/stranger in the supermarket/etc.) during the day — it’s a skill you can develop, too.
2. Focus on what what will be hot a year from now. Right now, there are a lot of freelancers pitching stories about frugality and simple living. But I think forward-thinking writers have moved post-recession and and pitching stories that are a step-ahead of the crowd. No, I’m not suggesting pieces on how to buy a share on a corporate jet or how to live large like Richard Branson — those days are gone. For example, we’ve been reading stories about “staycations” and cheap domestic travel, but I think international travel is coming back; if you write about travel, now might be the time to start looking for stories over the border. As a food writer, I would have been laughed at for pitching a story on caviar two years ago, but right now, it might be a good topic. I could do a little digging and find out that maybe caviar consumption is up around the world. Are caviar producers feeling optimistic again? Is this some kind of economic indicator we should pay attention to? Right now there are “happiness” and “simplicity” trends in literature; before this we were looking
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