FWN | How Do Writers Generate Ideas?

Subscribers to the Freelance Writing Network share how they generate ideas to write about for pitching to editors.

Hello!

Welcome to this Friday edition of the Freelance Writing Network. I’ve been wanting to put this together for some time now, and I’m delighted to finally be able to do so.

For a little while, I’ve been asking paid subscribers of the Freelance Writing Network to share a little bit about how they generate ideas to write about. This post is great, because it’s all shared from a range of different freelancers - people like you, doing the same sort of work each week.

There’s some content in here that I’ve found really useful, and will now start including myself to help generate pitch ideas. Even if you’re not a freelance writer, you might find some of these ideas useful for you in future.

Thanks to all those who contributed! Your time is greatly appreciated, not just by me but by all those who’ll take something away in reading this.

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George

Assorted magazines and publications

Reading the news and staying updated on social media are really useful. Obviously there are big trends (such as brat, Moo Deng etc) but often I find smaller, less noisy ideas to write about from keeping updated with what’s going on in the world as well.

As well as this, I like to use PR email lists and develop some of the ideas from these. Often they will have interesting developments, stories and profiles that they’re trying to push and you know that they will be willing to help you out if you can get commissions based around them as well. I’ve had some good success using PR lists in the past, though it can be time consuming reading through them to pick out the stuff worth writing about.