Let's talk straight for a minute.

[wednes]

Is it wrong to take someone else's personal tragedy and turn it into gripping fiction?

Is it a question of intention? Like, if I'm doing it to purge myself of the horror it's okay; but if I'm doing it to exploit a tragedy for profit, it's not? I'm not entirely sure if it's as black and white as all that.
I'd been trying to think of a tragedy so I could give one of my characters a back story. And then, as many of you know, I heard about something horrible that happened to someone I used to know. Is it disrespectful to make this tragic part of the story into fiction? Does it depend on the handling of the subject matter? Is it a question of how recognizable the real perosn is?

Frankly, I'm still really fucked up over this and need to work through it.

I know many of you write and almost all of you read regularly (books I mean, not street signs and menu's and shit). With that in mind, I would love to hear as many perspectives as possible.

In disappointing news, my computer will not be in a usable state until Monday. So I shall be resorting to the pre-analog system of writing things by moving a pen across notebook paper in loops and lines until it makes words. Yeah...I guess you can do that for other things besides a grocery list.

Did I mention that U of M has a 2-year MFA in creative writing (poetry or fiction concentration) and I wouldn't even need to take the GRE to apply??? I also learned recently that for educational purposes, bi-polar counts as a disability and I can get help paying for grad school. Not to mention, the program offers at least a 70% tuition waver and a stipend for teaching like, freshman comp and stuff. Could you imagine me teaching college freshman? High-Larious!
I daresay I'm almost ready for some hardcore schooling. I've wanted to go back to school for a while but didn't really feel ready. And of course it can be very expensive to start graduate studies and then fuck them up. In the last year or so, I think my overall craziness has lessened greatly. My ups and downs are less severe and actually working on writing projects has given me a lot of perspective and a greatly increased sense of self-worth. Being less manic and less depressed has been very, very nice.

And just so you all know, I went to Mworks for the pre-employment screen.
Let's hope that rumor about cranberry juice is true. ;-}