Consider these events:

• In the 1930s, a British sportsman is sailing down the Danube. A beautiful German woman hitches a ride and seduces him. Then she poisons him. The yachtsman survives, and becomes sucked into a whirling world of spy intrigue and derring-do.
• A pig drinks eighteen cans of beer, gets drunk, and picks a fight with a cow.
• A French biogas company contracts with the Mars Candy Company to process waste products from M&M manufacture. Beehives in the region start producing blue honey.
• A civil servant in Germany finds that the city has hired another employee to do essentially the same job, leaving him with nothing to do. So he does nothing for the next fourteen years – although he cashes his salary cheques regularly.
• A police officer in Sussex spends twenty minutes following the instructions of dispatchers who are watching CCTV footage of a 'suspicious character', only to find he has been chasing himself. He wondered why he was always 'so close'…

What do all these stories have in common? They sound like the wildest fiction. And they all happened. And couldn't you just make an episode in a novel, or even a whole short story out of each one?

Freebies, is what they are. Use them. Make sure you change the names and some other details, so you don't get sued. Particularly by that annoyed policeman. But hey, when life throws you thess titbits, do not turn away. Get your imagination working overtime.

And then, when people complain, 'It's unrealistic,' you just point out that…

Truth is stranger than fiction.

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

30.05.16 Front Page

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