Part Four: Searching
for Saleable Ideas
By Joanne D. Stanko
NOTE: My apologies to Jenna Glatzer and all the readers of Absolute Write for leaving my column empty for so long. Unfortunately, just shortly after my last column I suffered another stroke. It’s taken me a bit longer to reestablish my brain this time, but I’M BACK! Thank you for your patience and understanding. If you e-mailed a question to me, please know I will be answering all those questions as soon as possible.
Now that you’ve created an atmosphere and built your reference shelf, it’s time to get started. Before you dash off to your computer or typewriter, you need to do a bit of work first. You need to know what you’re going to write. Maybe some of you have a file drawer full of ideas already, but for those who don’t, here’s a way to get started searching for ideas. We’re not searching for just
any ideas; we’re searching for saleable ideas.
As a novice writer, I labored at finding just the right story idea and angle to satisfy editors and readers. The publishing world has changed dramatically in recent years, but one thing hasn’t changed: editors and publishers look for fresh material with new slants and, as a writer, it’s up to you to find those saleable ideas and tell the story like it has never been told before.
Some writers have so many story ideas they won’t live long enough to write all of them. That isn’t always the case. Most fledgling writers struggle to find story ideas and even experienced writers run short of ideas at times. So, you need to search for ideas that will sell.
So How Do You Find Ideas?
The best guide in searching for story ideas that will sell is sharing what has worked for me. So I sat down with my article clips and listed the top ten proven tips and techniques I’ve used while turning out more than 2,500 bylines.
1. Newspapers. No, not the stories you read, the stories you find. Check personal ads and want ads. I saw an ad requesting intuitive persons to call a 1-800 number. Being the intuitive person I am, I called. I found it to be a research project to discover if women are more intuitive than men. I conducted my own survey, did a little research and I gleaned another byline
Are Women More Intuitive Than Men?
Another ad sported the grand opening to a racetrack. I attended the opening, rode a sulky with the jockey, and interviewed him. That inspired the story
A Jockey... Well For 10 Minutes. It also gave me a full-page spread on the racetrack and opening.
2. Catalogs, brochures, magazines, and junk mail. Before tossing those old catalogs, brochures, magazines or junk mail, cut out interesting ideas. Catalogs of any kind can be full of ideas. Just think of things that have changed in the past 10 years. Fashions change, appliances get outdated, the computer you bought last year now has more features, and new improved tools are made. While going through a 10 year old Sears catalog, I compared it to the newest, from that came,
Which of These Gadgets Would Work Best for You? I received an unsolicited postcard asking me to call a phone number to claim my prize. When I called, they offered 2 nights and 3 days at any Marriott Inn of my choice. The catch was that I had to sit and listen to an hour presentation about some time-share property the company was pushing. An hour of my time and another hour with Marriott Inn officials landed me the story
Beware of Too Good To Be True Travel Arrangements.
3. Stories often generate another story idea. A new swimming pool at a campground doesn’t sound all that interesting, but when the pool is guitar-shaped, it does. I gleaned two stories from one. The first was about the campground and its new guitar-shaped pool. The second story was a two-page centerfold with pictures I had taken and an interview I had landed with singer, Charlie Daniels.
When I was the editor and publisher of my own newspaper, I reported on a plan for the construction of waterlines in a community where ninety percent of the residents had wells to supply their water. It reminded me of a story my father once told me about a man in our community who dowsed (technique using a willow branch) for finding water. After I interviewed the ninety-year-old gentleman,
Dowsing . . . it’s Charlie’s Specialty became a feature story.
4. Personal experience. This article came from my own personal experience of how, after a stroke, I had searched for new ideas and regrouped old ideas. Use your own personal experiences or experiences others have shared with you. Maybe you have a beautician in your area that styles hair but in her spare time crafts statues out of wood with a chain saw. Does your neighbor’s friend have an interesting hobby or personal story?
Other examples: Wild Species Next Door was about a local man who trained falcons, hawks, and eagles. In speaking with a local florist, I found that he suffers from agoraphobia.
Living Inside An Outside World told the story of how agoraphobics deal with the fear of open spaces. For the research on this article I simply interviewed the florist and went to an agoraphobia support group, listened, took notes, and found resources where sufferers could go for help.
5. Yellow Pages. Look for businesses that may be celebrating anniversaries. Find out how they have kept their business alive in this changing world. I wrote dozens of stories on the 10th, 25th, and 50th anniversary of businesses. Then, it occurred to me that other businesses deserved recognition too. I ended up with two very large publications for two cities,
Who’s Who in Maple Heights and Who’s Who in Bedford. Both were full of pictures, addresses, phone numbers, and short histories of the businesses in those towns. Just from these two publications, I gleaned ten more stories, all of them concerning business or personal challenges.
Taylor Chair: Seven Generations since 1816 was a book on the history of a chair company I’d help write and edit. Search for businesses that offer unusual services. Maybe someone engraves cemetery headstones or uses the old techniques of sandblasting to glass etch.
6. Look for the unusual in the ordinary. For example: Out Of Love, She Clowns Around was a story I wrote about a woman who made appearances at children’s birthday parties. Nothing unusual about that. It is when her birthday clown act included bike safety because while riding a bike her five-year-old son was hit by a car.
7. Radio, news broadcasts, and movies. Haven’t you heard a piece of news or watched a movie that touched you in some way? Maybe it made you angry, sad, or afraid. Jot down what the news was about and why it made you feel the way it did. I heard a commentator accuse local government officials of using city funds to attend government conferences as a means of personal vacation and enjoyment.
Local Officials Talk Government With US Senator John Glenn showed that these officials were doing their job. From my trip to the conference in Washington DC, I’d gleaned three more articles, one of them was a personal interview with John Glenn.
Once a movie sparked an idea concerning missing children. Just the week before I saw the movie, an eight-year-old girl had disappeared from in front of a convenience store near where I lived. As an investigative reporter, this story led to a series of fifteen articles.
8. People. I’ve already demonstrated a few people stories with my Charlie Daniels, dowsing, agoraphobia, and clown articles. There are other ways of generating people stories too. Be a people watcher. When you go shopping, notice what people wear, what they shop for, how much they buy. This led me to my
story Shopping on Impulse. My washing machine broke so I had to go to the
Laundromat. I watched what others did while they wait for their laundry to finish. This led to my story
How To Pass Time In A Laundromat. Magazines publish profiles all the time. Ask your librarian for the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. You’ll find an abundance of previously published personal profiles and articles. Make a list of those stories that interest you the most and why they are of interest. People profiles can be written with a fresh slant and updated material. Whether it is a profile or a human-interest story, make a list of plausible ideas with different slants. This might lead to the next idea.
9. Eavesdropping. It may be looked down upon, but I’ve found it quite exhilarating in searching for ideas. I sometimes sit in a local coffee shop to write. Two elderly women in the next booth were discussing holding a birthday party for their mother. Not very interesting until I heard the one woman say, “What are we going to get her? She has everything after 100 years.” I can’t tell you how quickly I scooted from the booth and politely interrupted their conversation. “Excuse me, I couldn’t help overhearing. Is your mother 100-years-old?” When they answered “no” I was disappointed, then thrilled when the 67- and 69-year-old daughters, giggled and said, “She’ll be 106 on January 20.” I interviewed the daughters and their mother the following day and have published the story fifteen times. She was 110 when I’d done my last story on her before I moved back to my hometown. This wonderful woman lived to be 116. Eavesdropping can be beneficial.
10. Conversations. During lunch, a writer friend, who writes nonfiction how-to books, said he was going to write a novel. A few years later, the same writer was collaborating with another writer. I had written several articles about their collaborating success.
At a writer’s conference, two speakers had viewpoints totally opposite of each other. That became an article
Who Do You Write For?
11. Dreams, yours or someone else’s. Someone once told me she had a dream about having to put her dog to sleep. She couldn’t get the vision out of her head of the hypodermic needle filled with pink fluid. I wrote that down as an idea and it became part of my novel. Another dream included a raggedy dressed man sitting on a park bench. That idea led to my story
Lost In The Shuffle.
12. Recognize ideas when you see, hear, taste, smell, or touch them. Your own senses are some of the best sources of ideas for future articles, short stories, or books. Some ideas already listed fall into the category of what I’ve seen or heard that spurred an idea. But what about taste, smell or touch? Train your senses to spot ideas. For example: While walking down the main street of a local town, a sweet aroma permeated the air and my nose led me to a restaurant that had just opened.
Flat Breads: A Tasty New Restaurant was featured in the local paper. After tasting the flat bread specialty,
Flat Breads: What are they? became a sidebar that accompanied the feature explaining where flat breads originated and how they’re made. (For information on sidebars and how to write them, see my article
Sell Them With Sidebars at http://www.absolutewrite.com/freelance_writing/sidebars.htm.)
The trick to finding a story idea is staying alert. Open your eyes, feel, hear, and breathe in your surroundings. Pay attention to what angers, excites, saddens, or otherwise provokes responses from you and others. When you find an idea, write it down along with the source it came from, the date it came to mind, and the angle that appeals to you. Then, while the idea is fresh in your mind, make a list of items to go with the idea and begin writing the story. If you can’t seem to get started on it, toss it in your “tickle” file. (I’ll explain a tickle file in the next segment.)
There are thousands of stories out there waiting to be told. Whether you write nonfiction articles, essays, short stories or novels, if you use your imagination while using these tips, you should be able to uncover enough ideas to keep you busy writing for months. Then, if you’re like me, while searching and writing, you might discover a new angle that is even more intriguing than the original idea.
MORE IDEA SOURCES
* Meetings
* Courtrooms
* Local Police
* Unusual Restaurant/Business
* Local Award Winners
* Local Writer, Artist, Singer, Poet
* Vacation Spots, unusual/inexpensive
* Campgrounds
* Local Library - Adult & Children, 10 most popular books
* Guinness Book of World Records
* Almanac
WHERE OTHER AUTHORS GET IDEAS
* Mary Higgins Clark sits in courtrooms hoping to hear or see something that will inspire one of her mystery novels.
* In his book On Writing, Stephen King says, “good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere.” He adds, “Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”
* Marsha L. Browne, freelance writer from Massachusetts, gleans her best fiction ideas from news clips and fillers from her local newspaper.
Bali Echo Magazine published two stories she wrote from notes in her travel journal.
* Freelance writer, Marian Wilson of Idaho, said her ideas are inspired by people she’s met in her 20 year nursing career.
RN and American Journal of Nursing published several of her personal essays.
* Annie Rassios, PhD., a scientist for the Greek government and newspaper feature writer and columnist, says she gets most of her story ideas from professionals, such as scientists, whom she meets when they visit her country. They have very different stories to tell and she’s able to use a different slant for her readers in Athens.
Joanne will also accept questions by e-mail from readers about writing and answer those questions in her column.
E-mail Joanne: joannedstanko@comcast.net.
Visit her site at http://worldzone.net/arts/joannestanko/
Joanne Stanko has published more than 2,500 articles. She was award recipient of the 1990 Woman of the Year for Beaver County, Pennsylvania, for her accomplishments in her community and excellence in journalism. She was on the staff of Slippery Rock University teaching her copyrighted writing course "Sell What You Write" and Creative and Freelance writing. She has appeared on television and radio, hosted several Writers' Conferences, and spoke for many conferences and writer's organizations. Her most recent articles were published in ByLine Magazine, AbsoluteWrite.com, and
Moondance.org.
For more columns by Joanne (Stanko) Kiggins, please click here.
