In my last post, I wrote about my using news stories from various sources to spur my thinking process and get ideas. This post will speak of one of my projects.
Of the many ways I cruise around to find ideas for my stories, reading the local and regional newspapers provides me with the most inspiration for my story ideas. Even though my stories are basically science fiction, I take material from several articles to formulate a new story idea or even give life to an old idea that fell onto a rough patch.
So, during the last few months, I collected a certain section out of the regional newspaper that covers nation/world news. Then I pull the article titles off of the page(s) and place them in chronological order in my word processor. I sometimes add notes about the article as well.
My Goal: To collect six months of these titles and then start building my short story series involving a space station in a far away galaxy. I intend to weave the stories around a series of articles appropriate for the era. Using the titles of these articles, I plan to build fictitious articles that go along with the overall story arc. Whether it is one of the main characters or one of the secondary ones, a character would read several news headlines. I hope to use this as a method of foreshadowing the story.
To tell the truth, I do not know how this will turn out. I hope to spend the month going through all of my notes I have collected for the series and start building an outline for the whole thing.
Also, while going through those articles, I spotted items that I wouldn’t mind integrating into a short story in the series as well.
What about you? Are you working on anything particular?