What writers want to take my Newspaper Challenge?

[Trebor1415]

This is a idea generation device geared for fiction writers, but can work for non-fiction ideas also.

Get a copy of today's paper (any legitimate paper will do) and read through the whole thing. Look for ways you can take the news events and combine them with ideas from other articles to inspire a fiction idea. Take a situation reported in one story and combine it with the fictionalized version of a person mentionized in another story and see where that takes you. Or, use an event that's being covered (like the massive Woodward Dream Cruise of classic cars that's going through several towns this weekend) and incorporate it into your work as a background or write a story about it.

I'm reading today's Detroit Free Press and there's articles on a WWII Marine Raider buried today at Arlington National Cemetary after his remains were recently discovered on Makin Island. His family lives in the area so the story focuses on the local angle, which would give me a lot to work with.

There's also coverage of wildfires in the west, the changing demographics of the Detroit area as the Hispanic population increases in size and influence and the affect that's having on local schools, and several articles on the Woodward Dream Cruise.

Personally, I'm gonna sit down with the paper later tonight and see how many ideas I can brainstorm from it. I don't know how many, if any, I'll want to carry through to completion, but I figure if I do this for a few days each week I'll have a list of ideas that I can then refine.

For my non-fiction work, I'm already planning to contact the family of that Marine and see if I can do piece for one of the Military Interest mags I read.

Try it and let me know what happens.

Rob

[Grouch]

Great idea, Rob! The newspaper has always been a valuable starting point for much of my fiction. I'm always cutting out stories and filing them away in my ever-exanding file cabinet. There's some weird and wacky stuff going on out there in the Real World.

[Trebor1415]

Originally posted by Grouch
Great idea, Rob! The newspaper has always been a valuable starting point for much of my fiction. I'm always cutting out stories and filing them away in my ever-exanding file cabinet. There's some weird and wacky stuff going on out there in the Real World.

Yeah, that's the problem with fiction. Sometimes it pales in comparision to real life. There's lots of stuff that's actually happened that no one would believe in a work of fiction, and the bizareness of the real world raises the bar for fiction.

Rob

That reminds me. I gotta go through my file cabinet again and see whats there.

[realtraveller]

The murder scenarios are great fodder for fiction. There is the murderess in San Diego who donated the skin of her victim-husband for skin grafting to cover up the evidence of the needle marks where she injected him with drugs. True story. An idea that we non-murderers might not come up with.

Then there's always the Ann Landers column.