If you are trying to secure some work for a relatively high brow outfit, then it is no good submitting commercial writing or casual pieces of writing. You need to satisfy the organisation’s expectations or they will look somewhere else. The same goes for freelance work that is meant to have an academic vibe, an informal vibe or any other general style.

If you don’t have any samples of your work that fit the bill, then you should consider writing some. This will help you to expand your portfolio to cover all the bases.

Birthday and Christmas cards see some of the worst writing committed to print by professional writers. Saccharine sentiments and corny rhymes are the order of the day. You could argue there’s an art to getting exactly the right pitch of sentimentality and the right rhythm to your rhymes, but you wouldn’t persuade many people.

In amongst the dross, there are a few gems. Sharp, witty cards that say a lot in few words. These acerbic works are a rarity though in an industry that prefers to play it safe.

But a card doesn’t end with what’s printed on it. Really, that’s just the start. Sending a card is a personal thing, so the thing to do is to find a blank card and add your own sentiments.

Personally tailoring all your Christmas cards might sound like an ordeal, but maybe that means we’re sending them for the wrong reasons. If you truly want to express well wishes, surely that means you can afford a few minutes and a bit of effort to write something meaningful and personal.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

With this in mind, it pays not to burn any bridges. You might be displeased with what you are being paid. You might get offended when an article is rejected. In these situations, it is often wise to bite your lip and look at the bigger picture.

Your relationship with an editor is likely to get better as time goes on, so where once you were pitching very specific ideas and having articles rejected, you might now be able to pitch an idea in a couple of lines and the editor will have confidence that you will do a good job.

As you get to know the publication and the editor better, so they will have more trust in your ability to produce articles which fit their needs. And as you build that relationship, you might find that your ability to negotiate better rates of pay improves too.

If you think the answer is ‘at the computer’, you’d be wrong. You probably didn’t say that though because the title of this post rather gives the game away.

Maybe you think I wrote them on my phone or on a laptop on the beach. Again, wrong. Pretty much all of my best writing was done while I was walking somewhere.

Walking gives you time to think and get your ideas in order. When you’re sitting at the computer, you’re constantly tempted to get things down as you think of them. This often means you spend your time thinking about how to word things and how to structure the article.

Those things need doing, but you might not be up to that point yet. Your idea might need a bit of honing. Away from the computer, you can get your ideas in order and when you finally sit down in front of the screen, you’ll find the words flow much more easily.