As Don Hewitt, of "60 Minutes" fame says, in his new book, "Ideas for stories are a dime a dozen but people who execute those ideas are a precious commodity. The formula is simple and its reduced to four words every kid in the world knows: TELL A STORY. Put words into pictures and tell your story with a flair. It's that easy." Of course his expertise is the retelling of incidences, in visual form, which happen round the world. While our job is to convert our mental pictures into words, the principals and the tools, craft if you will, are the same.

Since we are on the right track, we will take up where we left off last month with a few more of the spicers of stories, the enhancers.

• Honor - Dishonor:
  These two character traits deals with our human nature and its changeable form. It refers to esteem, both public and private. It's all about our self-esteem, how we feel about ourselves and how we feel about others. In observing the news and its feeding frenzy over the adultrous affair of Congressman Condit with his intern Shandra Levy, which may or may not have resulted in her vanishing off the face of the earth, how timely that we should be talking about this. Here is a perfect example of honor and dishonor in action. An incident has turned into an ongoing story that has most of us riveted to our couches watching this story unravel and weaving itself into our daily lives. So, writers out there! Play the "what if" game, crate your own characters who are strong enough to step into real life scenerio and weave the elements of their real life story around them.
• Criminal Actions:
  Murder, treason, larceny, rape, assassination, extortion, blackmail, counterfeiting, arson, etceterer, have at it! This category produces marvelous story lines. They appear abundantly in newspapers, magazines, on television, etc. You can farm them from many resources around you, play the "what if" game and write your story. In my youth, the men in my family were avid detective magazine readers as they are avid television crime show watchers today.
• Making Amends:
  This category requires a guilty conscience, a sense of right and wrong. It requires that your character display some levels of ethics, principals and scruples. Authors, in imaginative story twists, sometimes use others, rather than the perpetrator, to make amends. Two simple words, "I'm sorry", opens up vast fields for harvesting stories.

EDITOR'S NOTE:
Speaking of farming: Over these last months, we did receive a large amount of short stories from you. We are sifting through them slowly as we don't want to miss any good material due to rush reading. Especially good are the short stories written by geriatrics of their life experiences.