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Louise: "How did you get here?"
Johnny: "Well, basically, there was this little dot, right? And the dot went bang and the bang expanded. Energy formed into matter, matter cooled, matter lived, the amoeba to fish, to fish to fowl, to fowl to frog, to frog to mammal, the mammal to monkey, to monkey to man, amo amas amat, quid pro quo, memento mori, ad infinitum, sprinkle on a little bit of grated cheese and leave under the grill till Doomsday."
~From the movie Naked
Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it.
Oscar Wilde
Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.
Paul Theroux
Hello, I am Joy , this week's drama editor. In this issue, writing dramatic stories from non-fiction pieces will be our topic. |
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Welcome to the Drama newsletter
Do you know writers can come up with strong dramatic stories from non-fiction pieces? Yes, it is true.
One of my favorite non-fiction to fiction prompts is this: Take two or three non-fiction pieces on totally unrelated subjects, and use them in a story. The results from this prompt can be a mixture of genres with the research already done for you.
The way to go if you are writing for this prompt is to push more weight on one of the non-fiction articles more than the others, to create strong characters to fit its general idea, and to remember Aristotle’s six fundamental conflicts while putting together your plot:
1. human against human
2. human against nature
3. human against himself/herself
4. human against society
5. human against God/gods/fate
6. human against machine/technology
You can also use a non-fiction piece by relating it through a character’s eyes. You could, for example, take a real-life news story and tell or defend it from the point of view of a quirky or even a mad, hallucinating character who misunderstands things. Since the facts are usually distorted as soon as they are discovered, you could make any of your characters distort the facts. Distortions and exaggerations of facts can make a writer get closer to the truth.
When you look at a piece of non-fiction to see if you can use it in a story:
• Look for the tie-in of facts to truth or to your character’s persona in the article. For example, how would your shy, stuttering main character handle the facts inside an article titled, “How to Give a Speech in a Rally”?
• Find the different points of view in the issue of the piece. For example, if you are reading a piece on climate change, there are those who think the north and south poles will melt in ten years versus those who think this will at least take a hundred years. Then there are those who don’t believe this at all, while there are those who think new poles will form with one over Europe. Do you sense a sci-fi story in there somewhere?
• In each non-fiction piece, recognize its author’s bias and purpose in writing it. Can your plot take the opposite view and move in the opposite direction or can your characters defend the ideas in that article?
An important point is, while using an article or a non-fiction book in your story, you will need to keep in mind that there is a line between fiction and non-fiction, however undefined it may be. If you lean too much on the non-fiction, the story can result in boring the readers.
If you want to write a fiction piece, be it a short story, novel, novella, or play, making sure your non-fiction sources are reliable enough to lend believability to your work.
Here are a few reputable sources on the web for non-fiction that you may use in creating your fiction.
http://www.americannonfiction.com/
women&wine.com
nationalgeographic.com
nature.com
refdesk.com
vlib.org/ (net library)
http://www.pbs.org/history/
http://www.history.com/home.do
And for the younger set among us:
http://www2.scholastic.com/
www.msuglobalaccess.net/theme/travel/
http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/geog.html
http://www.geographia.com/
Until next time, enjoy the writing life. 
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Enjoy!
Stories:
| | BOUNDING HOME (18+)
Youth is lost forever as WWII trainees break their maidens as "Men o' War" on D-Day
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A few Interesting Contests:
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Thank you for reading our newsletters and for supplying the editors with feedback. Your feedback is very important to us.
Now, let's take a look at a tip.
This Issue’s Tip:
 One way to foreshadow conflict--in other words to create tension--is to make unrelenting people or opposite sides face each other in a show-down fight in several different scenes and on different issues.
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Jaye P. Marshall 
This was a very interesting newsletter on temptation that gave me some new "thinking points".
Also excellent job on your selection of stories.
Thank you very much, Jaye.
I am glad it helped.
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Drama: May 06, 2009 Issue [#3036]
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