Dealing with your ideas 
Ideas. They’re the lifeblood of any writer. Without ideas, you won’t be writing much and, if you’re a pro, you won’t be getting paid.
To be honest, I’ve never had much of a problem generating ideas. I’ve got a large number of them jotted down in notebooks, both physical and online. In fact, I’ve got ideas from the early 1990s that I still haven’t gotten to, and probably never will!
That said, I have other problems with ideas. And some of those problems are difficult to overcome.
On one level, that sounds like a strange thing to say. You’d figure that once you have an idea, you’re ready to start banging on the keyboard. Or, at least, begin doing some in-depth research. But there’s a lot more to it than that.
Quality of the ideas
Not all ideas are created equally. Some are great, some are just good. Others should be quickly abandoned. It’s an easy enough concept to understand, but in practice it’s much more difficult to implement.
I’ve been known to come up with an idea for an article, or even just a blog entry, and work on it full tilt. But there comes a moment when I realize that the idea is going nowhere. Either that, or it’s not going in the direction that I want it to. If I don’t abandon the idea, then I keep trying to bring it to life. Unfortunately, the result is often something I’m not happy with, not proud of, and whose only saving grace is that it brought me a few dollars.
When your idea’s not enough
An idea may be good, but is it enough for a full article, or even a blog post? Sometimes, the answer is no. On a few occasions, I’ve been contracted to write a 1,200 or 1,500 word article but the idea, and the material for it, is only enough to craft a 750 word piece. Or less.
In that kind of situation, it’s impossible to abandon what you’re doing without losing the confidence of an editor. When confronted with this particular problem, I’ve padded the article out with additional information. In most cases, that extra writing didn’t aid the thrust of the article in any meaningful way. It just seemed like padding.
The lesson I learned from this is that you really must analyze your ideas, and do a bit of preliminary research to see whether or not you can come up with a fully-fledged piece.
Finding the right market
There are countless print and online publications out there that cater to an array of interests and viewpoints. So, finding one that our idea fits into should be easy, shouldn’t it? In most cases, yes. But sometimes an idea doesn’t find a home, or takes a while to find one.
Why? Maybe the publication recently published a similar article. Maybe the editors don’t feel that the topic, while in line with the subject matter of their publication, is a good enough fit. And maybe they just don’t want to take a chance.
I’ve had this happen to me a few times. Back during the dot-com boom, just about everyone was gushing about how the so-called Internet economy was changing the landscape of business, and that the old ways of doing business were dead. I wrote a couple of articles that went against this grain, which detailed why I thought the dot-com boom was bound to go bust within five years. No one wanted to touch that article because it was counter to the conventional wisdom. As we know, my predictions came true — earlier than expected.
In another case, I wrote an essay about a train trip that I’d taken in the early 1990s. I couldn’t get a single travel publication interested in it, even though I consider that article to be one of the best pieces I’ve ever written. After about six years, the essay was published in an online magazine and will be included in an upcoming anthology that the folks behind the site are putting together.
Have you run into these problems with ideas? Have you had other ones? If so, leave a comment.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Not that I’ve done this consciously but now I think about it I’ve a habit of combining ideas, the second one acts like a kind of sub-plot; it can make the article a little less dry especially if you can tie the two threads together at the end.