How to Use April in a Story

How to Use April in a Story

Before I get to this month’s theme of beginnings, which seems like a good theme for a month in spring, I wanted to highlight how to use April in a story as this Monday Spark of inspiration.

April Fool’s Day: The holiday presents a great situation for humorous, middle grade fiction. Maybe a competition between kids to see who can fool the most people. Or maybe a family could be engaged in playing practical jokes on each other. An April Fool’s Day joke gone Horribly Wrong can kick off a mystery or thriller.

Spring Break: A trip always has a lot of potential for storytelling. Whether it’s a family trip, a trip with friends, or a mission trip, the process of traveling in the spring can be exploited for both comic and dramatic effect. Six years ago, my kids and I traveled with my oldest sister and her two kids in their van to visit our youngest sister and her children, who were living in St. Louis then. This trip has gone done in the annals of family history as One of Those Trips–you know, the one in which everything seems to happen.

My nephew was on the verge of wetting himself because we missed the drive to my youngest sister’s apartment. When my oldest sister and I saw on TV at the hotel on the morning that we planned to visit the St. Louis Arch that it was also the opening day for the Cardinals, we kicked into high gear and raced to the Arch in order to get a parking space. My youngest sister met us. Our lunch consisted of whatever she had thrown into a cooler. I thought I’d die of claustrophobia as we went up in the St. Louis Arch, but I was willing to make that sacrifice for the kids. Then I found out the ride was 4 minutes. We visited the City Museum and the three moms nearly lost one or both of our kids as well as our minds.

Each of these incidents could be the raw material for a short story, and all together, I have the inspiration for a comic novel.

Storms: Where I live, in a temperate climate, April is the first month of the year when we usually experience thunderstorms. Storms are a great plot twist or metaphor. As a metaphor, a storm can mirror dueling emotions, desires, or ambitions inside one character. It can also underline the conflict between two or more characters. The storm can be a twist to heighten the tension between characters or force them to survive and reveal their strength and weaknesses.

How would you use April as a setting?

For tips on how to use the themes of Easter in a story, click here.

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How to Write a Detective Team on ACFW

How to write a detective team

If you missed it from last year, I’m posting “How to Write a Detective Team” on ACFW, American Christian Fiction Writers, as a guest blog. Here’s the opening:

I’ll state the obvious: if you want to write a mystery, you must have a detective. But detectives come in all shapes and sizes, so you have a lot of room to develop an interesting main character. As you write, you might find your story is better if you have a duo of detectives. When I began my first novel, A Shadow on the Snow, my detective was 19-year-old Rae Riley. Since my mystery was aimed at teens, my amateur detective had to be one. But as I wrote, I realized Rae’s father, since he is the sheriff of their fictional Ohio county, had to join her in the investigation or else he’d look incompetent and lose her respect and those of my readers. So I stumbled into a mystery-solving team, and my stories are the better for it. Below are my tips on how to write a detective team.

To read more tips on how to write mysteries, click here.

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Inspiration for Plot in A Storm of Doubts

Inspiration of plot in A Storm of Doubts

So what could I possibly have in common with the Queen of Mystery, Agatha Christie? Well, aside from the fact that I inhaled her books in high school and still like to escape into them, one of my favorite lines in all crime fiction provided inspiration for plot in A Storm of Doubts.

In Murder on the Orient Express, the great detective Hercule Poirot is dining in the restaurant car of the train when an American, Mr. Ratchett, sits himself in an empty chair as his table. He tells Poirot that he wants to hire him as a bodyguard because he has received threatening letters. Poirot declines, no matter what amount the man offers. Ratchett says,

“What’s wrong with the proposition?”

Poirot rose.

“If you will forgive me for being personal–I do not like your face, M. Ratchett,” he said.

And with that he left the restaurant car.

Murder on the Orient Express

When Mr. Ratchett is found stabbed in his bed, few readers will be surprised because Ms. Christie does such a wonderful job of foreshadowing the fate of the sinister character.

When I wrote a pivotal scene in Storm where my amateur sleuth Rae Riley is confronted with a request from the ex-wife of a family friend, I decided to flip the quote above on its head. The ex-wife, Ashely, who doesn’t know Rae at all, except that she’s seen her speaking to her ex-husband Jason twice, wants Rae to tell Jason to unblock her number. Rae hesitates.

She grabbed my arms again. “Just tell me you’ll talk to Jason. Please. You have a kind face.”

I liked the idea of Rae’s kind face appealing to this woman. I also can use it in future stories. Some people just look friendly, or helpful, or commanding, and I can use Rae’s face to involve her in other people’s troubles.

And I enjoy being able to tie my book, however lightly, to a classic from the Queen of Mystery.

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Just Show Up

Just Show Up

If you’d like to know about the torturous process it took to get A Storm of Doubts into the world, please read my guest blog “Just Show Up” on American Christian Fiction Writers’s site.

Here’s the opening:

“I thought nothing could be more difficult than writing a novel during a pandemic. Trying to make sense of the world at that time dried up most of my creative juices. And what little that was left was consumed by becoming a teacher to my children.

“Was I ever wrong.”

To read the whole post, click here.

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