People ask me all the time, “Where do you get your ideas for a story?”

When I hear it, what I want to ask is, “Where do I not get an idea for a story?” Inspirations are everywhere, just waiting to hurry off into a story, and all I really have to do is ask one little question — “What if . . . ?”

But I’d like to talk a bit just now about one of my sources — the daily news — and why I like it so much.

One of the first stories I had published, when I started pursuing writing with some vigor last year, was Stand and Delivery at Boston Literary Magazine. It’s a fun little piece about a pizza delivery man I called the Pizza Dude and it’s based on a piece of television news footage.

In that footage, a pizza delivery man aids a police officer, chasing a suspect on foot, by pulling his car over the curb into the path of the fleeing suspect. It was fun to watch and I asked myself, “What if I told this from the point of view of the delivery man.

It’s a simple story — no vampires, no murders and only a bit of violence — that is effective because of it’s fast pace and it use of detail to make it feel real. And it is, I believe, fresh because it doesn’t make use of worn-out tropes.

The Maple Leaf Maneuver, another story pulled from the news, is set to run November 23rd at Every Day Fiction. It’s satire and it uses exaggeration and an eye for detail to poke fun at both American and Canadian national images.

It began as another “what if” question after I read a story about amendments made last year to Canada’s Citizenship Law, which now automatically grants citizenship to people living in other countries whose parents left Canada during the second half of the twentieth century.

I couldn’t help but wonder, as I read it, what would happen if Canadian authorities decided to enforce the changes in a proactive fashion by hunting down those “lost” Canadians.

My point with both stories is that you don’t need high drama to write effective flash and avoiding much-used plot lines is a good way to make your fiction stand out from the rest of the pieces in the slush pile.

So next time you’re in need of a story idea, pick up the newspaper or turn on the even news — and write right from the headlines.

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K.C. Ball lives in Seattle, a stone’s throw from Puget Sound. She is an night writer, an afternoon sleeper, who works through the wee hours because there are so few interruptions and because that is when all the good air is.

Her short fiction has appeared in various online and print publications, including Flash Fiction Online, Every Day Fiction, Boston Literary Magazine, Big Pulp and Murky Depths.

Her flash fiction story, Hair of the Dog, was included in the 2008 Best of Every Day Fiction anthology and her story, Coward’s Steel, won third place in the 1st Quarter 2009 Writers of the Future competition. It will appear in the Writers of the Future XXVI anthology in August 2010.

K.C. is editor of 10Flash Quarterly, an online magazine featuring genre flash fiction, and she blogs about writing at A Moving Line.