I have a dilemma. I can't read the news some days, since so much of it is bad. There are hockey players killing themselves, accidentally or purposefully, plus those falling out of the sky. There are tenth anniversaries of terrorist attacks and strangers that kidnap children in the middle of the night. But, there are also stories of strangers bringing children back.
I spend parts of every day perusing the news, looking for financial information to use in my day job, and then there is my fascination with why people do the things they do and how these actions affect us all.
If I can read the news, even the negative bits then I can feed that information into my intellectual and emotional processor. It all fuels my curiosity and makes me want to write because isn't fiction a way to try to understand the world around us?
According to the Globe & Mail good fiction, and not just genre page-turners, makes us more empathetic.
So, I'll continue to read the news daily and take some of my story ideas from the headlines, if just to try to get closer to the emotional heart of the matter, the deeper and wider dimension behind the facts.
No comments:
Post a Comment