Magazine articles also may originate in the writer’s observation of what is going on about him.  The specific instances given below, like those already mentioned, will indicate to the inexperienced writer where to look for inspiration.

A newspaper reporter who covered the criminal courts compiled the various methods of burglars and sneak thieves in gaining entrance to houses and apartments, as he heard them related in trials, and wrote a helpful article for Good Housekeeping on how to protect one’s house against robbery.

The exhibition of a novel type of rack for curing seed corn gave a writer a subject for an article on this “corn tree,” which was published in the Illustrated World.

During a short stop at a farm while on an automobile trip, a woman writer noticed a concrete storage cellar for vegetables, and from an interview with the farmer obtained enough material for an article, which she sold to a farm journal.

While a woman writer was making a purchase in a plumber’s shop, the plumber was called to the telephone.  On returning to his customer, he remarked that the call was from a woman on a farm five miles from town, who could easily have made the slight repairs herself if she had known a little about the water-supply system on her farm.  From the material which the writer obtained from the plumber, she wrote an article for an agricultural paper on how plumber’s bills can be avoided.

A display of canned goods in a grocer’s window, with special prices for dozen and case lots, suggested an article, afterwards published in the Merchants Trade Journal, on this grocer’s method of fighting mail-order competition.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE.  What we actually do ourselves, as well as what we see others do, may be turned to good use in writing articles.  Personal experiences not only afford good subjects and plenty of material but are more easily handled than most other subjects, because, being very real and vital to the writer, they can the more readily be made real and vital to the reader.  Many inexperienced writers overlook the possibilities of what they themselves have done and are doing.

To gain experience and impressions for their articles, special writers on newspapers even assume temporarily the roles of persons whose lives and experiences they desire to portray.  One Chicago paper featured every Sunday for many weeks articles by a reporter who, in order to get material, did a variety of things just for one day, from playing in a strolling street band to impersonating a convict in the state penitentiary.  Thirty years ago, when women first entered the newspaper field as special feature writers, they were sometimes sent out on “freak” assignments for special features, such as feigning injury or insanity in order to gain entrance to hospitals in the guise of patients.  Recently one woman writer posed as an applicant for a position as moving-picture actress; another applied for a place as housemaid; a third donned overalls and sorted scrap-iron all day in the yard of a factory; and still another accompanied a store detective on his rounds in order to discover the methods of shop-lifting with which department stores have to contend.