There is a method to this madness, I keep telling myself, as I wade through dozens of pages of research that I’ve collected. It’s always the same routine. I’ve over researched the topic, and I’m still at the idea/query stage.

I shared the pitch that landed me my first assignment with Ms. magazine on a writer’s message board a few weeks ago, and a friend asked if I really put all that effort into researching every single query?

Well, it depends.

The article I wrote for Ms. was about sex education in India (several states had banned sex education saying it was against Indian culture) and how the lack of it is sending kids straight to the Internet. The information they are going to find there is going to prove detrimental, I wrote. But education is just the first step. Access to contraceptives is a whole other battle. And then I went on to talk about how unmarried women who try to buy contraceptives or get sex advice from their doctors are treated with disrespect. I had already spoken to one woman who had sounded off about her experience and I mentioned her.

This is not news to anyone who has been in India for more than two weeks, and it is a topic I write about frequently. The query probably took about fifteen minutes to write and send out. I’d recently been interviewed on the subject, so I didn’t even have to look it up.

Other pitches aren’t always so straightforward. The thing is, before you can pitch a story, you have to know that there is a story to write and that there are people who will speak with you about it. That takes some work.

Of course, how much work you have to put in a story upfront really depends on the kind of subject you’re tackling, but let’s say you’re writing about a cool trend that would appeal to a women’s magazine. Well, the first thing you know you’re going to have to answer is, how do you know it’s a trend? Do you have numbers? Off you go to find them. Typically, I don’t do interviews before I’ve been handed an assignment, but I’ve now learned that it may be wise to do so when dealing with sensitive subjects. When writing about virginity restoration, with a deadline of a week, I got very close to losing my mind when trying to find a woman to talk on record. So if it’s a sensitive subject, off you go to find interviewees. If it’s a project, will the people running it speak with you?

I’ll typically also run a Google search to see what, if anything, has been previously written about the topic. All this takes an hour or two at most, and I’m ready to answer most of the questions the editor has about the subject and how I’m planning to report on it.

When I invest time and energy in an idea, more than an editor, I want to be convinced that I’m not on some wild goose chase and that there is a story there that I’m interested in. By the time I’m done researching it, I’m usually excited and ready to go. The query all but writes itself.

Usually, the article does too. But without a solid idea and a solid pitch, there’s always the chance that the piece will fall apart when you actually go off to report.

How much work do you put in your pitches? Do you wait for the go-ahead from the editor to do the primary reporting or are you so sure of selling your piece that you don’t mind putting in some extra work up-front?