From Mr. Lemley, Editorial Director of DrWeil.com.

1) Write About What Interests You

You are making crap-to-middling money, even at the highest levels, so use your writing as an opportunity to go to interesting places, meet fascinating people, learn, grow and improve the planet. Never, never, never take a gig writing about something you hate, or that bores you, or that you feel is destructive, just to make rent. I mean this. Drive a truck instead. The world needs truck drivers more than it needs good, cowardly writers in service to bad causes.

2) Dig Into Your Soul

If you want to be aloof and opaque, become a circuit court judge. Writers should confess their weaknesses whenever possible; it forms an instant bond with the reader. If you have no faults, cultivate some.

3) Show Don’t Tell

Write cinematically: Create a scene with vivid sights, sounds, and smells. Visual detail is the most compelling part of most magazine pieces.

4) Give Us Some Attitude

If something is ugly, call it ugly. Never add, “I think” or “in my opinion” to a description like that; of course it’s your opinion. The world is full of fearful people. If you are one, you can at least be fearless in print.

5) Get to the Point

Elliptical ledes should and do get cut. The lede should be the most interesting single thing that you saw or heard while reporting the story.

6) Don’t Send a 10,000-Word Piece to a Magazine

Find out the necessary length beforehand, and hit it within 10 percent. Blithering on and on is for amateurs.

7) Speak Up

You can argue, some, with editors. They conform to the I.Q. distribution of the public at large: some brilliant, most middling, some morons, and a few malevolent morons. As a freelancer, you don’t have a job with the company; so your job is not on the line. That means you can make your views known, within reason. (You can, after all, lose the fee.)