Lana Whited at Roanoke.Com

Have you ever wondered where writers come up with their stories? You probably had one of their important sources delivered right to your house this morning.

In November 1959, Truman Capote noticed this headline in The New York Times: "Wealthy Farmer, 3 of Family Slain." A few days later, Capote and his childhood friend Harper Lee were in Kansas, and the result of their work there was Capote's masterpiece, "In Cold Blood." In the book, Capote uses techniques of fiction writing such as plot, characterization, setting and symbolism to tell the story of the murder of four Kansans by two drifters who had met in prison.

Prominent examples of novels based on actual crimes are plentiful: "McTeague," "An American Tragedy," "Light in August," "Native Son," "The Postman Always Rings Twice," "Compulsion," "The Onion Field," "The Executioner's Song," "Looking for Mr. Goodbar."

Shortly after Theodore Dreiser began working at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in the early 1890s, he began to notice a series of crimes spurred by the same motive: a young man who was beginning to achieve some status in a very materialistic society killed (usually by poison) his pregnant girlfriend (or, more rarely, wife) because he saw her as standing in the way of his success. Almost always, there was a new, wealthier girlfriend.

Dreiser kept a fat file of such stories, and when he began serious work on "An American Tragedy" in 1919, he settled on the case of Chester Gillette, who went to New York's electric chair in 1906 for the murder of Grace Brown. Gillette killed Brown by knocking her out of a boat with a tennis racket and allowing her (and their unborn child) to drown. In an especially peculiar twist, Dreiser has his protagonist, fictitiously named Clyde Griffiths, conceive the idea of the crime from reading about a similar incident in -- you guessed it -- a newspaper. After an unusually long gestation, Dreiser's novel was published in 1925.

If you look at the daily newspaper as fodder for fiction, you can find a springboard for the imagination every day. A few years ago, I clipped a story about an Englishman who swapped places with his imprisoned twin brother so that the prisoner could have a vacation on the outside. "What a great novel that would make," I thought, which is why I put the clip in my "ideas" file. Sometime later, I realized that someone far more talented than I had already mined the look-alike prisoner vein: Charles Dickens, another Englishman, in 1859. The result is called "A Tale of Two Cities."

It's not at all unusual for fiction writers to work as journalists early in their careers. Fiction writing isn't terribly lucrative if you aren't yet John Grisham or Anne Rice, and journalism pays the bills. But it has other benefits, too.

Reporting usually allows writers to refine their writing style. From his reporting experience, Ernest Hemingway developed the heavy-on-nouns-and-verbs, easy-on-descriptions style his fiction is famous for. Think of newsrooms as a kind of gym for the literary: they can work out regularly with words, and the result is a leaner prose. The workout comes with no guarantee, however: Dreiser was famous for his fat sentences.

Reporting also encourages a kind of perception which is useful to a fiction writer. Like a good scientist, a writer must learn the empirical method: observe; record a lot of details; then draw conclusions.

I have cited two examples from novels based on crimes, so I should note that I don't consider all such books to be literature. If the writer merely records the facts of a case, it may not be very different in kind from newspaper accounts of the crime. The newspaper, it has been said, is "the first rough draft of history." Perhaps the true-crime book is the first revision of that history.

But a novel like "In Cold Blood" or "An American Tragedy" is something different. Some books, like Capote's and Dreiser's, may follow the actual details of a case very faithfully. During his research to construct the factual backbone of Part Two of his novel, Dreiser followed Chester Gillette's footsteps around upstate New York, even climbing into a rowboat on Big Moose Lake and frightening his poor wife, Helen, into thinking he might actually re-enact the crime.

But the novelist went a step further. He created, out of his own imagination and experience, a past to explain the present of young men like Chester Gillette. He embellished and enlarged the facts, to make out of them a larger truth: a warning about where Gillette might have come from, and a suggestion about how terrible violence might be averted.

The result of Dreiser's efforts is not a true story, but a story which tells us a truth. And that is neither journalism nor history. It is art, grown from a black-and-white newsprint seed.

So if you're interested in writing fiction, here's some good advice: keep your eyes and ears open to current events. What events in today's news would make compelling plots?

A cousin of a prominent Boston political family is prosecuted for a crime 20 years after becoming a suspect.

Several years after two babies are switched in a hospital, the parents of one child are killed in an auto accident, and the mistake is discovered.

A former professional wrestler becomes a governor.

A president whose term was marked by sex scandal heads toward retirement as his controversial wife enters a hotly contested Senate race in a populous state. (This would be the sequel to "Primary Colors.")

A 5-year-old boy is found afloat in an inner tube, his mother drowned at sea, during the passage from a dictatorship to a democratic country. His custody is a major topic of international debate, headlining the news for months. Crowds form around the boy's home, threatening riots if he is sent back to the dictatorship to live with his father. The vice president of the democratic country proposes to resolve the matter by an act of Congress.

You know, sometimes the truth really is stranger than fiction.

A novel use for the daily news