Two Good Choices to Write Your Magazine Idea

Many different magazine article ideas swirl around in your head. As I recently wrote, magazine ideas are everywhere. How do you select which one to write about?

First ask yourself, does the idea drive you wild? Does the idea motivate  you to begin researching or writing the article? The experience doesn’t always have to be so dramatic. Yet occasionally it is the case. You have to find a piece of paper or get to your computer and write this particular idea.  If you’ve not done much magazine writing (or even if you have done it), it’s perfectly OK to write the entire article—as long as you have several things in mind when you do it:

• When you write, always keep the reader firmly in your mind. What will they take away from your article?
• Who is the potential market for the article? Where will you try and get it published? Some publications read full manuscripts while others will only read query letters.
• The most likely possibilities for magazines are ones that you often read and are intimately familiar with their contents and their readers (since you are one of these readers).
• Keep in mind the standard length for these target publications. It will not help you to write 3,000 words if the longest article in the magazine is 1,000 words.  In general, magazines are using shorter articles.
• In general, magazines are planning their content about four to six months ahead of their publication date. For example if you have a Valentine’s Day experience which you want to write, that’s OK. I’d encourage you to write it—but plan on it getting into print in some February 2018 publication.

There are several different basic types of magazine articles.  If you have decided to write the article, often one of the strongest types is the personal experience article. The story is written in first-person and you tell your personal experience—yet in a targeted way so you have a single key point or take-away from the reader.

Other types of magazine articles include service articles (to promote or tell about a new consumer product or service), how-to articles (how to do some activity), personality profile article (often focused on some well-known person or someone who has an interesting life or life experience), “as told to” article (where you write in the first person tense of another person and write their story) and the celebrity interview (often done on assignment).

And what are the two good choices that I started this article? The first choice is to write the full article. Let your enthusiasm for the topic carry you to move ahead and write your idea. You get the words out of your head and on the screen or paper. From my years in this business, writing the article is a good choice. The second good choice is to channel your enthusiasm about the idea into a one page letter called a query letter. I’m going to give the details of how to write a query letter in my next article in this series.

For now,  I would get your magazine ideas down on paper and written.

________________________________________

1. Terry Whalin, a writer and acquisitions editor at Morgan James Publishing, lives in Colorado. A former magazine editor, Whalin has written for more than 50 publications including Christianity Today and Writer’s Digest. He has written more than 60 nonfiction books including Jumpstart Your Publishing Dreams. His latest book is Billy Graham, A Biography of America’s Greatest Evangelist and the book website is at: http://BillyGrahamBio.com Watch the short book trailer for Billy Graham at: http://bit.ly/BillyGrahamBT His website is located at: www.terrywhalin.com. Follow him on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/terrywhalin