These pages will be filled with real-life stories: I’ll stack up a load of true tales from various books of mine, so they’ll mostly relate to Liverpool, but if anything that will show you that stories are everywhere if you’ll just turn over a stone or two. After that, I’ll add stories as and when I find them, or you send them to me.
For fiction writers there are two basic approaches to looting real life:
* being inspired by the story and researching it in depth and with a passion, for a ‘faction’ treatment – using all the available facts and imagining the rest. Dodgy if any of the characters are still alive, but you can’t libel the dead, so history is fair game.
* being inspired by the true story to take the essence of it and build your own world around it; the bizarre, comic, tragic, fascinating event or character described makes you wonder why and how and what if… And if this happened here instead of there, or if it were at this time, or in the middle of this event, or on another world… etc ad inf. The variations and potential are infinite, once you have the spark.
If any of these stories really grab you, and you are driven to write the book, let me know and I’ll take the story off this site, so that no-one else takes the same idea. (Of course there’s no guarantee that they won’t stumble over the same story somewhere else.)
Do please send me any stories you find fascinating or entertaining so I can build this into a deep pool of ideas to loot.
Freemagination 
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