Where Does Drama Come From?

         I went to a family reunion last weekend. I guess every body has them, or maybe some people manage to avoid them. I observed something very interesting: A family reunion is a pile of dramatic stories waiting to be written. Real life has the seed of a story. The writer is responsible for making it exciting, powerful, inspirational or instructive.

         It sounds pretty dull on the face of it. A bunch of people connected by ancestry and marriage get together and eat and play games and show pictures of the same boring events in other parts of the country. But drama resides in those people and their memories.

         One woman had a son in prison. There may be some drama in the way he was caught breaking the law, but the story that interested me was her inner struggle to accept him when he was released.

         One family member couldn't come because he had terminal cancer. How he completed his life was a storm of drama.

         One family member was adopted. How he related to this adopted family without blood connections was a dramatic story.

         One woman had been in touch with the child she had given up for adoption 25 years ago. Just to hear her experience was dramatic, and what a story it would make.

         One family member had survived a series of heart attacks with the aid of a device to shock his heart into rhythm. Breath taking events were almost common for him.

         Each of these and many more could become emotion packed stories. I could be on my way to
writing a book called "Stories from the Family Reunion."
         Every writer has a family, co-workers, friends or classmates whose real life events are the basis for a great story. You can't claim that there are no stories to write. It is up to you to make them dramatic and eventful, to create charming and courageous characters, and place them in intriguing settings.

         Write on!