I’ve told you about Charlie’s story haunting me, and I’ve been working on that. One of the pivotal events in the tale is something that happens on the school ground, and I got the idea from an incident on our high school campus (yeah, YEARS ago).  Of course, Charlie’s only about 10, so I had to figure a way to get it down to an elementary school.

Recently I was clicking through the internet – yup, I’m an internet browser.  Sometimes I’ll be looking for something, and an article will catch my eye and I click on that, and the next thing you know, an hour has passed and I’m miles away from where I started. Anyway, I ran across a news story about something very similar to Charlie’s problem!  While looking at it, several others popped up, all the same or similar experiences that have happened over a span of about 10 years.

Well!  Who knew?  It’s kind of disconcerting to find Charlie already making headlines. But this could be a good thing.  At least it’s a believable problem! If anybody ever came to me later and said, “Oh, that couldn’t happen…” I’d know right where to prove them wrong.  So I’m saving those stories, just to back me up. Of course, none of them had Charlie’s solution, so there’s still a bit of originality to be had.

It seems I’ve run across a lot of ‘art imitates life’ episodes lately.  Has this ever happened to you?  Do you have your plot, or solution, all figured out, trying to come up with something unusual but plausible, when BAM!- it really happens somewhere?  Does this mean our minds just aren’t coming up with original stuff, or that life is catching up with us?

I’m happy with taking issues that everybody is aware of, but maybe hadn’t explored all the deep questions about.  That what if factor is kicking in.  But what do YOU do?  Do you scratch your idea and start over, or use the factual account to build upon?  I actually have two other projects that started out (in MY mind) to be very original, but news stories have caught up with me.  Now the best I can do is try to find an angle that’s not widely used.

What happened to starting with ‘once upon a time’ and making it all up?  Now we either have to make sure our reader believes in our story, or come up with something so outlandish he can’t refute it because, well, nobody’s ever done it before.

For me, it’s not the action, but the people behind it.  So this might work in my favor.  I want my reader to realize they’ve never thought about the people on the sidelines. Yes, those are the ones I write about. Maybe – just maybe – I can stay ahead that way.

Meantime, I’m still listening to Charlie…