Current Events, or not?

Good morning!

How many of us are prompted to write a story based on current events? A show of hands, please? Okay, a few, but not as many as I thought there would be.

It seems that the 'ripped from the headlines' school of thought isn't as prevalent as I thought it was. I know the news stories I've read for the past few years seem incomplete; the new breed of reporter seems to have forgotten the 'who, what, where, when and why' precepts of yesteryear, opting instead for the shrillest, most irritating way of reporting possible. Now, people are sent scurrying off to other news media for more information, making the reporter no more than the little boy standing at the city wall yelling, "Hey, look at that!"

And, that method of reporting gives us pause. We're left to fill in the blanks and that can lead to a lot of supposition, which in turn, spurs those creative writers among us to immediately follow the possible storylines that crop up in our heads. We think we can make it more interesting, more challenging, more gripping, more...well, you get the idea.

But, if we go in the wrong direction, we are not doing justice to what really happened. Maybe a minor character in the story was, in fact, the hero of the piece and was simply being modest. Or, the reporter didn't perform due diligence when writing the story and neglected to ferret out the facts. We can stir up a great deal of animosity if we don't get the facts of the story right. We can even create a false hero. I may be old-fashioned, but I believe in truth in all things. Sure, we're writing a piece of fiction, and we have some leeway in what we write, but let's get the facts straight. If we don't, we may as well have created the story from within our own minds in the first place. So, I steer clear of true stories, preferring to use my imagination to create what happened and who was there.

Thank you,
Derek A. Murphy
Author of Gulf of the Plains, Congruencies, It Happens Every Day and others.
Avalaible on Kindle