By E. E. Kennedy
“Ripped from the headlines!”
That was the tagline for the popular long-running TV series, Law and Order. And there were many
episodes that did seem to parallel what was going on at the time.
Over the years, I’ve found
that the real-life stories in the newspaper and now the Internet are great
places to find springboards for intriguing plots. In fact, one of the points in
my speech, “Ten Answers to Every Writer’s Favorite Question: Where Do You Get
Your Ideas?” was to recommend that beginning writers collect the back pages
from USA Today. You know the ones
that have little thumbnail stories from each state? I guarantee that there was
a plot idea for at least one story—and probably more—on each of those pages.
For instance, one tiny story
spoke of a fellow in Iowa who was arrested for throwing baseballs at passing
cars. That’s all there was, but it gave rise to the classic question, “Why?”
Did he hate cars? Was he a former player? A pitcher, perhaps? Was there
something in his childhood that caused this sudden irrational behavior? There’s
enough speculation in that small paragraph to spark a funny or maybe a tragic
short story. Or perhaps to begin a novel.
I’ve made good use of news
stories in my cozy mystery series about an English teacher. In the first book, Irregardless of Murder, I take advantage
of the legend of a Loch-Ness-Style monster in Lake Champlain as well as
modern-day sightings and made one of my characters a scientist who is involved in
a search for the mythical creature. It makes for lots of fun.
As a child, I remembered a
news story about people who drove cars across the thick frozen surface of Lake
Champlain. Needless to say, it’s a dangerous proposition and gave me the
opening scene of Death Dangles a
Participle. I did a good bit of research on how thick the ice would have to
be in order to support a beat-up VW and two teenage boys.
The third book in the series,
Murder in the Past Tense, was born one
afternoon when I was waiting for my daughter to complete her piano lessons and
could only find copies of old National
Enquirers to read in the teacher’s living room. As I read about actress Jennifer
O’Neill’s difficult life and her many marriages, I came upon a name I hadn’t
heard in decades: Nicky diNoia, a producer and entrepreneur whom I had once
known as a talented actor. It turns out he was one of Jennifer’s husbands and
was killed in his Manhattan office in a mob-style hit. I had known that guy
when I was a teenager in summer stock theater. The article went on to say that
the murder had never been solved. Then and there, I decided that one day, I’d
solve it, if only fictionally. And I did.
For book four, Incomplete Sentence, I had always been
interested and outraged by the story of the Unicorn Killer, Ira Einhorn, who
claimed to have founded Earth Day and who was found guilty of brutally
murdering his girlfriend and stowing her body in a trunk in his closet. With
the help of influential friends, he managed to skip out on his sentence and
evaded authorities for over twenty years before being finally apprehended.
Readers of Incomplete Sentence will
recognize this plot line.
When we lived in Texas, there
was a local drug dealer who liked to style himself after the hero in the old “Smokey
and the Bandit” movies that starred Burt Reynolds. He called himself the Ranger
Bandit. (Ranger was a small town near us.) The Bandit was a colorful character whose
front businesses were a liquor store and a body shop. He kept a pet tiger and
would take out ads on the local newspaper taunting the Texas Rangers when they
missed him during a raid of a meth lab. He was always tipped off in advance. There
were lots of news stories and rumors about this brazen criminal. Shortly before
we moved to North Carolina, the Ranger Bandit was caught, due to some excellent
undercover work by the Texas Rangers who took out their own newspaper ad that
said simply, “Gotcha!” What writer could resist using such a plot?
Of course, when fashioning a
fictional story based on a true one, it’s a pretty good idea to change the
names. (In Murder in the Past Tense,
for instance, Nicky diNoia became Danny diNicco.)You can change the events to
suit you, too. It was later determined
that Nicky’s business partner had arranged to have him killed. In my story,
there is no such mundane solution.
In Incomplete Sentence I didn’t fashion a carbon copy of the Unicorn
Killer, either. Instead, I called him the Rasputin Killer, as frightening and
mesmerizing as the famed mad monk who held the Russian royal family in sway.
And my villain’s real name was Gregory Rasmussen. The real life Einhorn was
found in France, married to a French woman who had no idea of his background.
Not my Rasputin Killer. He was a lot more elusive—and deadly!
So go out and buy a copy of
the Sunday paper this week and scan the headlines for something intriguing: a
situation, a heroic act, a fascinating character or some other subject that
strikes your fancy. Cut out the articles. Ask mental questions:
who/what/when/where/how and most importantly, why? Research the subjects. Make
notes of possible plot lines. Change the story to suit your own. There’s a lot
of great raw material out there, fellow writers! Truth is indeed stranger than
fiction.
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E. E. Kennedy is the author of the Miss Prentice Cozy Mystery Series (published by Sheaf House) about a high school English teacher. Titles include: Irregardless of Murder, Death Dangles a Participle, Murder in the Past Tense and Incomplete Sentence.
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