Writing articles about health that are worthy of sharing isn’t easy. The information must not only be accurate, but the article should also be interesting enough to capture and hold your readers’ attention. While there are a lot of steps that go into creating content, every health article starts with a great idea. Here are concrete steps you can take to develop those ideas more easily.

Writing Articles Starts with a Great Idea

Finding great ideas for health articles takes time. You could rush through this step and write about whatever comes to mind first. But the payoff will be much larger if you find an idea that you really connect with. And chances are, if you care deeply about it, your audience will too.

To come up with ideas, you have only to look around you. Here are three ways to find inspiration:

Follow the research. According to the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, researchers collectively publish about 2.5 million scientific papers each year. If you write articles about certain health topics, I recommend signing up for email alerts from the journals that you read most often. You can also use Google Scholar to set up alerts for specific topics. Reviewing these regularly can help you keep up-to-date on the research, and also generate ideas for new health articles.

Look for trends. Watch the world around you for interesting trends, such as a rise in uninsured Americans, a spike in coronavirus cases, or a recent drop in cancer-related deaths. These trends may show up as published studies, news reports, posts on social media, or conversations at scientific meetings. Sometimes it requires you to put together information from multiple sources, such as COVID-19 hospitalizations and medical bankruptcy filings.

Listen to people’s stories. One of the skills that I’ve learned as a health and science journalist is listening to other people. And not just when I am interviewing them, but whenever they are talking. This is a great way to learn what health topics people are interested in, what questions they have about what’s going on in the world, and most of all, how they are impacted by those events.

Focus Your Idea Before Writing

Once you have an idea for a health article that piques your interest, you need to focus the idea. Otherwise, you risk having the idea wander all over the place. If you are a freelance writer, a lack of focus can turn a great idea into a lousy pitch, which means you’ll probably never get to write about it at all. Here are some things to keep in mind when focusing your idea:

Scope. There’s a big difference between a topic and an idea. “COVID-19” and “depression” are both topics. But unless you are writing articles for an encyclopedia, they are too broad to work for a health article.

Try focusing your topic to something more specific, such as: “Depression among Americans on the rise during the COVID-19 pandemic.” Or even more focused: “Lack of telemedicine support during COVID-19 leaves Americans with depression with nowhere to turn for help.”

Format. You might hesitate to decide what shape your story will take until you’ve started writing it, but format can have a big impact on how you focus your idea. Are you writing a brief news story, an in-depth feature article, or a profile of a researcher studying a specific treatment?

Even if you start with the same topic, you will probably generate different ideas for each of these formats, possibly multiple ones for each.

Audience. Think about the people who will be reading your health article. You may not know exactly who they are, but you probably have a sense of what they’re like — general readers, scientists, science nerds, business owners. You can get even more fine-grained than that.

Each of those groups will have different interests and goals for reading your health articles. What questions might they have about the topic? What information are they seeking? What will they do with that information? The answers to these questions can help you focus your idea.

Publication. Likewise, the publication you are writing a health article for also matters. Some publications only want the facts about a new scientific paper. Others are more interested in the scientists who made the discovery. The topic may be the same, but the idea that fits each of those publications could be very different.

Tips for Perfecting Your Idea

Fully developing your idea is essential because it guides all of your research and writing. Imagine what it would be like if you tried to drive across the country without having a clear idea of where you were going. You would definitely get somewhere, but it might take you a long time to reach that destination. And if you are a freelance writer, you are probably already short on time. Here are three tips to help you perfect your idea:

• Don’t rush the process. Unless you are working on a deadline, let your idea sit for a day or so. This is a good time to come up with related questions, do a little more research, or find ways that it connects to people’s lives. You can even try going for a walk and letting your unconscious mind do some of the work for you.

• Run it by someone else. If you work with an editor — or even an editorial team — they will help refine your idea. But if you aren’t that lucky, try sharing your idea with another writer, your spouse, or your social media followers. Ask them whether your idea is clear and if they have any related questions. Sometimes that will help point you in an even better direction.
• Don’t fear starting over. Even after doing all of this work to perfect an idea, sometimes it turns out to be not that great. If you run into that, take a step back and see if you can pinpoint the reason for this. Maybe the idea isn’t focused enough. Or maybe it’s too similar to other health articles that you’ve read. Try to refocus the idea. But don’t force it. If it doesn’t feel right, let it go and move on.

Writing articles about health becomes easier the more you do it. As you get better at finding ideas, you might be tempted to dive right in and start writing as soon as inspiration strikes. However, make sure you fully focus your idea before sitting down to write. This will not only save you time researching and writing, but you will find yourself writing articles that really connect with your audience.