From Idea to Income: Make Money from Your Writing

Want to make money writing? It can be simpler than you imagine, as long as you value your own ideas, and follow through on them. In this article, I'll share with you a simple process I give my writing students.

I've been teaching writing, and how to make money writing, for 20 years. Here's what I've found: new writers (and many established ones) fail to value their own ideas. They need someone to give them validation, by saying: "Yes, this is great idea!"

Too often, they try to get validation from family, friends and other writers, none of whom are qualified to validate ideas when they're simple seeds. If you follow the process below, you'll be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, working with your own baby ideas, until they grow and generate an income.

Here's my simple process.

1. Capture Your Ideas -- Don’t Let Potential Income Evaporate

   The first step is to have a method of capturing your ideas. You'll find that you get ideas when you're doing something else. I always seem to get ideas when I'm walking my dog, and in the shower, as well as when I first wake up in the morning.

   I keep index cards handy -- yes, even in the shower, in the pocket of my bathrobe -- so that I can capture ideas as inspiration happens.

   Each evening, I transfer ideas to my computer.

2. Build on Your Ideas -- Feed and Water Your Baby Ideas

   Capturing ideas is all very well, but you need a method of building on your ideas.

   If you're a working writer, most of your ideas will relate to current projects. Implement those ideas immediately.

   Other ideas relate to new projects. Keep "Active Projects" and "Inactive Projects" folders on your computer, so you can track seed ideas, and can build them into money-makers. Under these two main folders, create a new folder for each idea.

   I like to review all my projects each weekend. I'll create outlines for projects, with tasks. For Active Projects, I transfer the tasks to my calendar, blocking out time to work with these projects. For Inactive Projects, I'll create a Tasks outline, to track my thinking until I decide to work on a project, and it becomes active.

   If I decide a project no longer interests me, I delete it. I often get an idea to combine two projects into one strong, powerful project.

   Simply reviewing your projects will give you fresh ideas -- you're now well on the way to generating income from your ideas.

3. Turn One Idea Each Week Into Income

   After you've captured and built on your ideas for a few weeks, there's a final step in this process.

   Decide that each week, you'll take one of your active projects, and will turn it into income.

   You need to make this decision, because if you don't, ideas can languish in your "Active" folders for months, and even for years.
   Taking your ideas from seed ideas to writing income is a simple process. Try it: it works.