How many of us have dreamed of seeing our work in a high profile magazine. I know I have and decided that I needed a helping hand. So after the success of the Creative Writing course I was sure that Suite 101 could do the trick again and joined the Magazine Writing course. The course I took was again the "short" version which meant that I had access to the course material but not to any course interactive chat boards. I find this suits me but I have taken courses with the interactive element and have found it can be stimulating to exchange thoughts and ideas with other students.
The main aim of this course is to help the aspiring writer to break into the lucrative but highly competitive arena of magazine writing. To this end topics such as how to find and develop ideas, research markets, write a query letter and structure your article are covered.
Lesson one starts by guiding you through the process of finding an idea for an article. This I find to be the hardest part for me. I tend to stick to what I am familiar with and for the beginner this might be a safe starting point. Once you have your idea you are then shown the steps needed to go about finding suitable markets for any articles and how you need to find the right angle within your article to attract the attention of an editor.
In my opinion the most useful part of the course was lesson two on writing the query letter. I have researched magazine writing extensively on the internet and the consensus among freelance writers is that crafting a good query letter is a valuable skill to develop as it is one of the keys to unlocking assignments and to gaining publication. Here Lisa-Anne, who is a successful freelance writer, gives advice on how to structure the query in a professional manner to ensure the maximum chance of success with an editor.
In lessons three and four Lisa-Anne tackles the nuts and bolts of structuring and writing the article. For those who have some writing experience much of this will be familiar territory but there are some good tips, particularly some useful research sites on the internet, as well as advice about submission guidelines.
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