One way into a story that I’ve mentioned before is place, setting, environment. Let’s take, only to show the way this can go, that most cliched of settings/environments – a rainy day.
Note that a rainy day isn’t enough by itself. We have to ask ourselves, why is this rainy day different from every other rainy day?
Maybe it’s because of where it happens – a rainy day in Arica, Chile (look it up), a rainy day on Mars, a rainy day at the bottom of the ocean. Each one of these would require you to imagine a whole different world or an unusual chain of events that made the rain significant and suggested some kind of characters who might be in conflict because of it.
Maybe it’s because of when it happens or how long it’s been going on. (As a North Vancouver resident, I can tell you that four straight weeks of rain can have an emotional impact.)
Or maybe its just that you imagine a rain that is, by its nature significant. Because it’s acidic? Prophetic? Filled with microscopic biomes?
Because I’m thinking mystery right now, for my story the rain is a cover that influences how a murder goes down in an unexpected way and the strange clues it leaves behind. I see a struggle, an attempted rape where the rapist slips on the wet mud and falls on his own knife. But he’s not dead until the would-be rape victim grabs him and rocks him back and forth on his knife, driving it in deeper until it severs an artery.
Okay, some interesting things about the clues could come out of that, but the real key will be the almost-victim’s psyche, why she reacted as she did, what she’ll do now. If it’s noir, she’s screwed. She’ll be running from her conscience (or not? Maybe she was happy with what she did.) while some detective questions her, falls in love with her, and ends up emotionally screwed himself.
If you want a feel-good ending, you could have her come to terms with it and maybe even gain reader sympath as she finds she was actually targeted and the main person targeting her is still after her. Now she has to survive and, if you go the thriller route, stop the bad guys and maybe fall in love and rescue someone along the way.
And all this out of a little rain…
