Ripped From the Headlines

As I printed out a well-written newspaper account of the chaos that occurred at Sunday's Chicago Marathon yesterday to place in my idea file, I felt a little twinge of guilt. Dozens of people became ill at the event. One even died. And yet it inspired me as something to include in one of my works in progress that has a Chicago setting. My stomach did a few jumps out of my moral objections to what I was doing.

This is hardly the first time I've used current events in my writing. I've written about the aftermath of 9/11, how love often grew between those closest to the deceased as they comforted each other. I wrote about a man who'd been found dead Monday morning after lifting weights alone in his office, with no one to help him when he suffered a spasm. I wrote about a wedding fiasco I read about in the local paper. I've got a novel drafted around the aftermath of a tragic fire in my hometown. Plus, I have in my file an article about a fatal holiday car crash, although I haven't used that one yet. All of these incidents were devastating . . . to real people.

But wait a minute. Fiction is drama. A novel where everything is hunky dory and nothing extraordinary, even tragic, happens will read like a real snooze and for that reason will never be published. That's a fact. I told myself to chill and promptly went back to my search of the headlines.

Is anyone else influenced by current big news stories, or by those human interest stories? Do you overlook anything with a tragic overtone? If not, do you ever stop and ask yourself, What the hell am I doing?