Friday 12 August 2022

Newsprint and Coffee

Photo by Ron Porter on Pixabay

Newsprint and coffee are my way of waking up to the world. When my husband was alive, we took two newspapers. This allowed early mornings to be a companionable time of rustling the pages, refilling the coffee pot, and grunting comments to each other on what we read.

Apart from providing a relaxing start to the day, newspapers are a treasure trove of ideas for writing. I read the paper cover to cover, absorbing not only the headlines but the snippets of information contained in the filler paragraphs.

A robot lawnmower escapes through a hole in the fence, council workers dig up the wrong driveway, a householder is fined for an extravagant display of Christmas lights. The list goes on.

Fact is often stranger than fiction, but facts provide a springboard. Disputes over wills, parking wars, over-zealous officials, there is no shortage of material to inspire stories or scripts.

That’s my excuse anyway when the postman or milkman finds me perusing the paper, still in my dressing gown past nine in the morning. 

 Madeleine McDonald


 

Madeleine has work in a plethora of fiction anthologies as can be seen from her Amazon page

She also writes historical & contemporary Romantic Suspense. Her ebook Enchantment in Morocco is now available via Kindle Unlimited.