If you've been keeping up with my writing process, you probably know that I have been playing around with a few storylines. As a reviewer, I read many books with weak plots and predictable or weaker endings. I didn't want to make the same mistake. So I decided to do like Frank Peretti and take a year to plot a solid story. My year is almost halway up.
Well...a story came along this week that maybe too good to be true, because it is was real. It was news. It was crazy. And it was the perfect trigger for my story about this woman searching for a missing bride to be(now you know the newstory I'm speaking on:))
My bride had been kidnapped(actually she was pretending to be kidnapped to thwart a killer.) And I have reworked this plot to the point where it has lost all good sense. I needed a simpler motive for her disappearance. I needed to take my book out of horror into a suspense. And I needed to make the theme of the novel coherent with the tone of the book. Up until today the two were out of whack. But now my whacky Runaway Bride has given it some teeth.
But I'm not sure. Law & Order SVU does it all the time--that is, take news and turn it into a teleplay. But can I get away with it. Can I take a news story, make it a premise, use its climax as my storyline without getting sued.
I don't know, so I'm asking you. Do fiction authors take news and tweak it into fiction? Is it legal? Is it ethical? Is it creative non-fiction gone bad?
What gets me is that I had been working on a story line so similar to this story and now I fear it might get to see the light of day, because someone actually did it? Aargh!! Help me...
Writing to see what the end' gon' be,
Dee
The Pruning Principle
2 years ago
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