Right Up Our Alley

Anyone who reads this blog with any regularity will notice that I get ideas and write stories based on people I meet here or there, hither and yonder, but I write nothing based on the wife.

Shouldn't the wife be thankful that I have not turned my attention to her predicaments, and I refer specifically to that mystifying and difficult relationship between her and her mother? A relationship whose abrasions are made by her mother's truculent attitude? Would it not fill a book, rather than constitute a short story? Would not Joyce Carol Oates give me a gold star for capturing the turbulence of the typical mother-daughter dynamic?

There are other subjects the wife would bring to the table, but the old rule of thumb in writing fiction says conflict is drama, and drama makes a good story, and so I would stick to this particular subject. I think that it won't take but a second to decide that I should be left alone to the usual topics that are -ahem- right up my alley, and that it is better for me to look outside the wife's immediate relationships for ideas and insights.