action-ink.com

You may think that your career in journalism is the key to free speech. Finally, you have the platform to be able to report on and talk about whatever you like. Right?

Wrong.

Because increasingly, journalists have to pander to the requirements of the sales and advertising departments and whether you like it or not, you will often find them dictating to you exactly what you should be reporting on.

This really is an issue for your editor to deal with. It is up to them how far you do pander to the advertisers but you must work out your own way of dealing with this constant battle.

You will often find that you find an interesting business or entrepreneur to report on only to find sales and advertising reps coming up to you and telling you that you should really be mentioning the cheese shop down the road because they’ve just spent £3000 on advertising. Frustrating.

Always check with your editor first, but a good way of dealing with this is to continue with your article as you were and simply add a fact box at the end including the cheese shop somehow. You could even title the fact box ‘with thanks to’ and then list any advertisers that the sales rep has demanded you include.

This way, you don’t feel like you are cheating your readers into investing time in a piece which is essentially an advert in disguise and you still get to write what you want. And hopefully, it will satisfy the sales staff enough to keep them off your back for a while.

Be firm with advertising and sales staff and don’t always pander to their requests. Readers buy your magazine for the informative and interesting editorial; so don’t cheat them out of this with adverts in disguise.

One of the keys to magazine writing is being able to target to different readers. As any good journalist knows, you must always keep your target reader in mind whenever you are writing a piece for a magazine as this will help to produce a piece that the readers will find interesting.

This is why it is important to know your reader before you start writing. It’s no good writing a piece and then sending it to a load of magazine titles to see if they are interested because nine times out of ten, they will be able to spot that you haven’t written it just for them.

Research the target audience of the publication before you begin writing and you will be halfway there to writing a feature that will be suitable for publication.

A good way of knowing whether you are a talented writer is thinking about whether it comes naturally to you.

If you can sit down and write something within a reasonable amount of time and without struggling and the resultant piece of work is of a good standard, then it’s safe to say that you are a good writer.

If however, you struggle to get your ideas down and it feels like an effort to complete a piece of writing, then perhaps it does not come as naturally to you.

A lot of people can write to an average standard, but to make a living from it, it needs to come naturally to you and it needs to be good.

A lot of people seem to think that magazine writing is an easy profession. But in order to write features that engage the reader and encourage them to read the entire piece, you need talent, skill and knowledge of this type of writing.

The main thing is to know the angle of your feature before you begin. If you simply start aimlessly writing you will find yourself with an article with no direction that will simply leave readers confused – and that’s if they can be bothered to wade through it.

Secondly, magazine writing is a lot more informal than other forms of writing. You need short sentences that don’t make the reader work too hard.

Magazine writing is not something that just anyone can do. There is plenty of competition out there so if you don’t write interesting and engaging copy, then magazine editors will find someone who does.

Writing is one of those professions that people seem to leap on. If someone asks what you do for a living and you reply by saying you’re a writer, you will find that the majority of the time, they will say something along the lines of: ‘oh right, yeah, I’m thinking of going into writing.’

This can be really frustrating. It seems that a lot of people tend to assume that anyone can be a writer. But just one look at some blogs polluting the internet tells you that this really isn’t the case.

Writing is a skill. And it’s not a skill that everyone has. There is a huge amount of competition out there, so you must be able to offer something exceptional if you are hoping to make it as a writer.

It’s not a profession that anyone can fall back on and a lot of people will find that out the hard way.

As most writers know, finding time to sit and write as you have a great idea is unlikely. Keep a pen and notebook with you AT ALL TIMES and you can jot down any particular inspiration or sentence/line that you have thought of. You can then refer back to your notes when you have a spare ten minutes and – voilà – the ideas is not forgotten, and can be harnessed for your next show stopping novel.

A writer’s journal can perform this function, as well as its primary: opening your imagination. If you make sure you write in it at least every few days, about what you’ve seen, your ponderings on things, and ideas you may have had you will really start to notice a difference. Even if it starts out being a bit like a diary, it will soon morph into an imagination portal, where you can really put those crazy things in your head into words.

Why not use the back pages of your journal as a notebook – for ideas and jottings when out and about – and the front as an actual journal? Two birds with one stone. Or something like that.

A great writing lecturer once told me that, in order to write your best work and effectively edit and take criticism, you have to be fully prepared to kill your babies.

What he meant (rather than brutal child murder), is that your favourite line in a poem, or paragraph in a story, or chapter in a novel , probably needs to be taken out. A horrifying thought for anyone new to writing or who is only just becoming accustomed to others’ feedback, I know, but a necessary one none the less.

Be prepared to see your writing from someone else’s point of view. You may think that this particular image is poignant, beautiful, lyrical and meaningful, when in actual fact it is just pretentious, pompous drivel.
The bottom line is to get over yourself, and be aware that if you want to write for other people, you have to listen to other people and admit the fact that you don’t always know best.

If you were a high quality editor, who got sent hundreds of manuscripts a month, or even a week, which ones do you think you’d reject without even reading? None – do I hear you say? Rubbish! Why waste the time of reading event the front page of someone’s work, if they haven’t been bothered to put the time in for you to make it look uniform, neat and consistent.

Always check their specifications. If they say they want in double line spaced, Times New Roman, size 12, and yours is none of these things, they’re going to assume that you didn’t bother to read their specifications, and – if that’s the case – they’re not going to read any of your work.

Make sure you have numbered pages, your name and title on each page, and – for goodness’ sake – keep a copy yourself!

Most full time authors (think J K Rowling, Margaret Atwood, Bernard Cornwell etc) will tell you that they have to treat writing as you might any other occupation: you need to have work time, and home time. Obviously if your writing doesn’t pay the bills (and, given you’re reading this, I presume that means it doesn’t), making enough time is a whole different ball game.

A good way to get 15 minutes writing in every day is to wake up early and write in bed. It may sound the opposite of what you want to do, but nobody makes it with the big boys if they’d rather get an extra 15 minutes kip that chase their dream.

Even if you can’t schedule time in every day, you should make sure that you determine a time every week and dedicate it to writing. Otherwise, it will end up being a line here and there, when you’re on the bus, or waiting for a film or on your lunch break, and you’ll end up with a million half-started poems or chapters, without any of them going anywhere.

It may be a cliché, but it is still valid advice. You need to give your readers some credit, and let them do the work: imply and suggest without blatantly spelling everything out. Your readers won’t enjoy reading your work if it seems as though it is written for people with two brain cells.

Try this for size:

“Jason entered the room sheepishly, trying not to be noticed. He sat down on the back row, gently, so the chair didn’t creak.”

Or

“Jason slowly opened the door and slipped through. He made his way to an empty seat at the end of the back row and sat down, taking care not to move the creaky plastic chair.”

The latter suggests the first, and though it uses more words to do so, it gives the reader a clearer impression of what is happening. Actions speak louder than words (while we’re on clichés) so make sure your writing is full of actions and movement, not stilted phrases and explanations.