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.
Whilst I understand the attraction of the daily read of a newspaper, I no longer take one. For a while, I was a photographer on a local weekly rag. I left the job when I found that the stories, usually unimportant local events, reported by my colleagues were often unrepresentative of the story I had heard when taking the accompanying photographs. I quickly learned that such dishonesty was at the heart of newspaper publishing, so departed for a more honest form of employment.
ReplyDeleteThat's not to say there is no truth in newspapers, just that they need to be read with an awareness that everything they print is not necessarily true.
Thanks for reading, Stuart. I agree with you that one should take newspapers and TV/radio journalism with a good pinch of salt. I try to read papers across the spectrum of political views, and also to listen to foreign radio news stations. We shouldn't stick to our own comfort zone. However, it's the filler paragraphs that often spark ideas for fiction.
ReplyDeleteYes, Madeleine, those odd paras can often spark an idea. I now come across some of those through social media.
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