Last week, I offered to bust readers’ excuses for not pitching magazines — or, if they’re pitching, for approaching only low/no-pay pubs. I received several excuses that are holding writers back, and I’ll be busting them over the next several weeks.

Here’s Deonne’s excuse: I come up with lame article ideas, not fresh, newsworthy ideas, and it makes me give up trying entirely. How to get over my insecurity about this and forge ahead?

Let me reassure you by saying that there’s no new idea under the sun, and editors know that. What’s different is how you present an idea.

When you brainstorm ideas, the first things that pop into your head are just seeds of an idea. So your job is to take those ideas, which may not be newsworthy at first glance, and play with them to give them what’s called an “angle” or “slant” — that’s journalism parlance for “the particular mood or vein in which something is written, edited, or published.”

If you attended Diana Burrell’s free teleclass yesterday on how to generate salable ideas, you heard her talk about how to take tired ideas and make them fresh again by looking a year into the future. So, for example, we’re in a recession now, but articles on scrimping and saving money are becoming pretty stale. Diana suggested that in a year, luxury will be back “in,” so instead of pitching about the cheapest cuts of meat, you may want to pitch a piece on caviar.

Something else I like to do is pitch what I call an “opposite idea.” For example, in the case of the money-saving example, several years ago I turned the women’s magazine’s typical penny-pinching article on its head by pitching an article called “When It Pays to Pay More,” which I sold to Family Circle. When peanuts were being banned in airplanes and schools due to allergy scares, I sold an article called “In Defense of the Peanut,” about the peanut’s health benefits to Oxygen.

Your seed of an idea might also turn into a salable idea if you broaden or narrow it. For example, instead of pitching a feature on a local woman who is fighting to ban trans-fats in her local elementary school’s lunches, you can query a round-up of four people who are doing something exciting and new to encourage schools to serve healthier lunches to children. (That’s broadening.) Or if you have an idea about the best places to go wine tasting, you can change it to the best unexpected places to go wine tasting, focusing on little-known wine-producing areas. (That’s narrowing.)

Finally, a unique presentation can change an idea from ho-hum to salable. For example, you can offer your article on how to deal with difficult co-workers as a chart with instructions on how to handle different types of jerky office-mates, from “the emotional vampire” to “the non-stop talker.” You can also offer a quiz, or a graphical treatment such as an illustration of a body with call-outs with health tips that point to various parts of the body. (You wouldn’t be expected to supply the illustration.)

Again, when you brainstorm, think of the ideas that pour out of you as seeds, not complete ideas. You’ll need to turn them around in your brain to come up with ways to turn them from “lame” into “sold.”

Need more help? Diana Burrell’s e-course Become an Idea Machine: How to (Painlessly!) Build Up an Inventory of Story Ideas to Sell to Magazines starts on Monday! [lf]

If you liked that post, you might also like:

• 3 Ways to take Your Article Ideas from Stale to Salable
• Bust My Excuse: My Idea Has Already Been Done!
• Bust My Excuse: I’m Not Sure How Long a Query Should Be!
• Why Your Article Ideas Aren’t Working
• Bust My Excuse: I Get Held Up Researching markets