Developing An Idea Into A Piece Of Writing
It’s one thing to come up with an idea; it’s a whole other to shape it into a workable subject. After all, ideas are largely abstract, often-general material. Until you can drill it down into a topic that could make for a compelling piece, it’s not of much use.
Giving It An Angle
An idea is only as good as the filter you put it through. It needs an angle, a way of looking at it that may be different than anything that’s been done before.
Every subject has numerous aspects, multiple approaches that you can use to treat it. Note every possible position that you can employ and narrow them down, cutting ones that may prove neither interesting nor vital to your intentions.
Test The Idea
Once you’ve found potential slants that you can employ, it’s time to test the idea for its soundness. Is the reasoning sound? Does it make sense at face value? Is it relevant to your potential readers? Basically, you want to find out if the idea can stand on its own.
Writing Preparation
After deciding that you will push through with the planned piece, you need to gather the necessary resources to facilitate the writing phase. List down all the research sources that you need to look up, including books, papers and actual persons. You want to gauge whether the piece entails a reasonable amount of digging though (i.e. you will likely not want to pursue a 300-word piece that requires two months of research).
Finally, you want to make a rough outline of the idea, the way you want it to look like in the actual feature. List down major sections, the sequence of events and the general plan for the presentation. If you can, plan out the different stages of writing you will embark in, from putting together the first draft to using a proofing software to the final editing, so that things can go smoothly when you do begin the actual job.