During our weekend workshops with an ambitious numeric goal to reach—100 article ideas matched to magazines at our recent IdeaFest, for instance—there is always a hesitation in the air on the first day and even the morning of the second about whether each writer will reach the goal.

For IdeaFest, we had several group sessions on what an idea really is, what editors need from us, and how to make sure your idea is a good fit for a magazine before I handed out pages marked one through 100.

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