This is one of the most common ways people find their ideas. Out of their lives, and values, they think of something they want to say, and then figure out how to say it.

Maybe you've had cancer and recovered, and you want to tell other people how they can survive cancer. Maybe you've been treated rudely one too many times and you decide you need to write something that will tell people how they ought to treat other people. Perhaps you've discovered a way to plant a garden that is more successful than any other way you've seen. You would like to tell someone what you have learned.

Let me give you an example:

I homeschooled all of my sons until they went to high school. Naturally, people would often ask me why i did it and sometimes how. One day, it occurred to me to write an article explaining why and how I did it. I queried a suitable magazine and got a yes, so I wrote the aritlce. Not difficult. Then I wrote another one for a different magazine. And then I wrote yet another. If you're interested, you can see one of them here.

Home Education

However:

When you write an essay, article, or non-fiction book, you normally have a theme—an idea you want to get across (very similar tot he thesis you have when you wrote an essay). However, beginning with a theme when you want to write fiction, or even drama or poetry, is a lot trickier. Some people might even say you shoudln't even try.

The problem isn't that you can't do it. The problem is that your writing is likely to feel constrained or even pedantic when you have something you want to make it say. The best fiction comes from characters who come to life as you write them. And then when you read what you've writen, you see what your theme is. Plays and screenplays are the same. Poetry is best when it comes striaght from the heart.

Now, I'm not saying you can't ever write fiction or plays or poetry with a theme in mind. Just that if you do, you have to be very, very careful not to force the theme.

Let me give you an example:

Years ago, I had just gotten married after a couple of years as a high schoo English teacher. One of my biggest frustrations was that so many kids saw themselves in a negative way, as in “I’m not smart enough, not athletic enough, not good-looking or pretty enough, don’t have a car/computer/DVD player,” and so on. The trouble was, most of the kids I knew thought this way—even the ones who seemed to have it made.

I was taking a writing correspondence course and I was supposed to be writing a short story of some sort. But instead, a whole book began taking shape in my head. It would be about this really ordinary teenage boy—who saw himself as nothing special, and this other teenage boy who had everything every teenager could want—the looks, the girls, the car, the athletic ability, the brain—the works!

I would have the ordinary guy tell the story from his point of view, and of course the whole novel would hinge on the premise that what’s really important isn’t any of those surface things you have little control over, but who you are inside.

But from there, instead of starting to write the story, I developed the six main characters. I had been raised in a small town, so I set it in a similar small town. And then I worked on getting to know those characters as well as I knew myself. I knew that the characters had to drive the story: not me.

When I was done, I knew the characters and the story so well that I honestly wrote the last three chapters first. Then i went back to chapter one and started it. I got to chapter six and got stuck. around the same time, my first son was born and I was very busy. So I put it in a file folder.

It was over ten years before I putlled it out, read the beginning I had written and, without missing a beat, wrote the missing chapters, barely changing the last three.

And yes, it's a coming-of-age novel about a very ordinary, average teenage boy who has a very low self-esteem, and who learns that what's important isn’t any of those surface things you have little control over, but who you are inside.

If you like, you can read the first three chapters of the book, Best of Friends.

Writing Exercise:

Think about some people or groups of people you would like to say something to, and then write down 10 things you would like to say to some or all of them. Don't worry about the form of writing you would use; just think about what you want to say.  

Now, there are some common sense boundaries. If I tell you I'm going to query a specific editor about an article on an upcoming event, and you quickly fire off an email to the same editor about writing an article on event, that is definitely a no no. And anything that has been published or produced is protected by copyright.

But on less specific things, stealing ideas is allowed. For example, if I read an article on how to raise great kids in a magazine, and I find that I have things to say that weren't said in the article, there's no harm in my writing another  article on how to raise great kids using my perspective and my own examples. No, you can't  combine three of the first author's points with two of yours. What you write has to be different, has to be uniquely yours. Other wise you're guilty of plagiarism.

So you write a totally different article, but with the same overall focus—how to raise great kids.

Now, what do you do with it? Well, unless raising kids is the primary focus of the magazine, I probably wouldn't send my article to the same magazine where you read the original. At least not for a few months. Why? Because they just published an article on that topic. And they likely won't publish a similar article for at least several months, probably a year.

You can also steal ideas from other places. The key is that you have to make it totally your own and not simply mimic what someone else has said.

There's also a reason most great writers have hung out with other creative people. When you get talking to each other, ideas get thrown out and you never know what any of you will come up with.

Let me give you an example:

One of the very first articles I had accepted by an editor came from an idea I "stole" in a sense. Years ago, I'd been part of a Bible study where the pastor had a lot of things to say about Jonah—very few of them good. I have to confess to feeling rather annoyed during the evening, but not completely sure why. Later, I spent some time rereading the book of Jonah and thinking about what had troubled me about the pastor's words. Eventually, I realized that I strongly sympathized with Jonah.

I actually was doing very little writing at that time. Besides having three young sons, I was part of the leadership in a church plant. But I felt so strongly about this one thing that I made time to write an article I called "My Friend, Jonah." It later won a prize in the Alberta Christian Writers Contest. And when I finally began sending pieces out, it was accepted by the first magazine I tried, Confident Living. That gave me a big boost in my desire to do more writing.

Going off-topic, but the irony here is that although I was paid for "My Friend, Jonah" in 1989, the article has never been published. Although Confident Living published a number of other articles I wrote, for some reason, the editor never found the right issue for this one. When the magazine went out of production, they returned my rights to the article.

If you want to read it, here's a link.  You'll be one of the first people to read it.

My Friend Jonah

Writing Exercise:

Look through a few magazines you have. What do you see that interests you, and that could be written from a different perspective?

Check out copyright laws here:

Canada

US