As I mentioned earlier, I'm a big fan of Agatha Christie's detective movies and novels. I used to spend two hours daily reading, so I decided to write my ChapBook in the style of a detective story.
To begin with, I thought of a general idea for my future book, which came to me while I was visiting my mother's house. At that time, there was a small festival in our town where judges visited each house and rated their gardens. As my mother was a professional gardener, her garden was full of plants, flowers, and beautiful bushes. So, in my story, the protagonist was modeled after my mom, Elena.
Creating the plot was relatively easy, as I found Agatha's detectives to be quite effective in crafting a book. I knew that an engaging story needed to start with something unexpected. For detective fiction, it could be theft or death, but as my primary audience could be quite squeamish, I decided to begin with an enigma (the death of a cat) and a bit of sarcasm, which added some drama to my story and made the audience feel more at ease.
Creating the characters was one of the easiest things to do, as I already had some real-life prototypes. However, the police officer and his assistant Thomas were borrowed from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous detective book about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson because, for me, detective stories could not exist without two smart investigators. To make the characters more interesting, I gave each of them opposing traits. For example, the postman is cunning and greedy, but he is in love with Elena, and Elena's best friend Lucy is a fashionable lady who works hard on a farm, etc. This approach was used to show each character deeply and uniquely and made the audience react more to the story.
The main challenge was creating a good ending for my story. To have a happy ending, I needed to find the suspect and arrest him, so the victory could be "on the good side." Fortunately, I remembered the special technique used by Agatha Christie herself for her detective stories. In this technique, she used to read the story again and find the most uninteresting character to make him the suspect.
Finally, when the story was complete, I showed it to my mother as it was about her. She gave me some advice on how to improve the text, and I checked my final results with a close friend.
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