PROMPT 6 – NEWS
MINING
The news is
a rich source of story material. Take a look through the news items in your
paper, any online news source, television, or radio. Pick one of the news
events and write a story based on the event having a much different cause than
what was reported. In other words, give them a story that is a bit more
fantastic than the truth.
Another
interesting aspect of this prompt is that the genre of the story you are
planning to write will affect how you interpret the news items. The unfortunate
news of a commuter train derailing will generate a much different story for
romance than it will for a mystery or an action/suspense novel.
The news
item I used for my example involved the trading of political prisoners.
Based on
that idea I generated the following elevator pitch.
Catch and Release – The President orders the military in
Afghanistan to start secretly releasing dangerous prisoners in exchange for
information from the terrorists about their rivals. On the surface this looks
like a standard political move, but it is really a vicious program of
annihilation. Each of the released prisoners has been infected with a virus
that will spread death to the terrorist network and their families. The
situation changes when several of the service men return home and die from the
same engineered virus that they are supposed to be immune, except that this
mutated strain no longer targets people that share DNA
with the carrier.
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