Happy Flag Day!
What better way to celebrate than to talk to award-wining author Kate Messner
about her middle-grade mystery book, Capture the Flag!
Kate’s newest middle-grade novel series has it all – excitement, intrigue, high-stakes action, and best of all it centers on the stolen American flag! What a great idea and a fun topic for our Flag Day post!
A stolen flag, a secret society, and three complete strangers . . .
Anna, José, and Henry have never met, but they have more in common than they realize. Snowed in together at a chaotic Washington, DC, airport, they encounter a mysterious tattooed man, a flamboyant politician, and a rambunctious poodle named for an ancient king. Even stranger, news stations everywhere have just announced that the famous flag that inspired “The Star-Spangled Banner” has been stolen! Anna, certain that the culprits must be snowed in, too, recruits Henry and José to help find the thieves and bring them to justice.
But when accusations start flying, they soon realize there’s even more than a national treasure at stake. With unexpected enemies lurking around every corner, will the trio solve the heist before the flag is lost forever?
Praise for CAPTURE THE FLAG
A Junior Library Guild Selection
“A fast-paced mystery . . . a sparkling start for a promising new series.” –KIRKUS REVIEWS
“A novel as cinematic in execution as it is patriotic in theme.” –PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
I just finished reading your delightful book, Capture the Flag, I was wondering – where did you get the inspiration for this story? Did you visit the actual flag in the Smithsonian?
I did visit that flag – but not until I already knew I was going to let it be stolen in this book! The inspiration for CAPTURE THE FLAG was actually the setting — I love airports and thought it would be great fun to set a mystery in one during a snowstorm. I love the super-charged atmosphere…everyone coming or going someplace. In airports, everyone has a story. And I loved the idea of the snowstorm keeping everyone stuck there for a short period of time so my kids could investigate the crime, knowing that if they didn’t solve it, all the evidence and suspects would fly away as soon as the storm let up.
Much of the book takes place in an airport and the baggage area underneath. Were you able to go behind the scenes of the baggage handling area to do research for this book?
That’s the one thing I wasn’t able to explore firsthand in my research. Not surprisingly, airport security in a post-9/11 world doesn’t make exception for children’s authors. However, I was able explore those under-the-airport worlds virtually, since most companies that build baggage handling systems have videos online showing how they work.
How much research, if any, do you do for your fiction books? Do you think this is important?
I do extensive research for my books, especially when it comes to making sure I have the setting just right. For CAPTURE THE FLAG, that meant spending a day at the Smithsonian, exploring behind the scenes with the curator of the flag exhibit and talking through just how those fictional bad guys might get out of the museum with the flag.
This book is your first mystery. Did you have fun writing it?
Great fun – but it was a great challenge, too, and taught me to plan in much more detail than I’d been accustomed to with my previous books.
Any tips aspiring authors should be aware of when writing mysteries for middle grade readers?
When I teach mystery writing workshops, I focus a lot on planning – the idea that suspects aren’t the only ones who need motives; investigators do, too. It takes a lot of playing around with ideas to make sure all the details end up fitting together just right. And I think setting is huge in mysteries, too. The place can be a huge part of the story, and I encourage writers to think of it as the playground for their characters. What adventures can happen in a museum? In an airport, or a rainforest, or at the World Series?
Do you tend to stick with one writing level at a time or go back and forth depending on what inspires you?
I write across genres — middle grade, chapter books, and picture books – both fiction and nonfiction – and I love them all, so I couldn’t choose just one as a favorite. Most often, it’s my deadlines the determine what any given writing day looks like. The book that’s due first gets first priority, and when I’m not on deadline, I tend to play a lot, working on whatever seems to be calling me that day.
Your characters are ethnically diverse. How important do you think it is to have ethnically diverse characters in middle grade books?
Very much so – and I’ve actually been quite involved in providing input for the covers for this mystery series. Scholastic has been amazing about asking for feedback, and we’ve talked about just this topic – the importance of not only including kids from different backgrounds on the covers but also showing their faces. When I was teaching 7th grade, it was important to me that all of my students could find books with faces on the cover that looked like theirs. It was frustrating to me when most of the books I could find with brown faces on the covers were historical or issue books, where the story was about the character’s race. In real life, it’s not like that — kids of all different backgrounds go to school and play lots of different sports and solve mysteries and have adventures, and I feel like we need to be mindful of that when we write and market books, too. I’ve been thrilled with the covers for the books in this series! (And I can’t share the cover for book 3, MANHUNT, quite yet, but I can tell you that I think it might be the best of all!)
Many thanks! ~Kate
And many thanks to you, Kate, for giving us a peek into your writing process. Mysteries are my favorite and I really loved this book! Can’t wait to read the new one in the series.
To learn more about Kate’s many amazing books, see her website http://www.katemessner.com/
Now, for what you’ve all been waiting for, Kate has generously offered to donate an autographed copy of Capture the Flag to one lucky reader! Simply leave a comment below and you will be entered in the giveaway.
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Jennifer Swanson is a life-long mystery lover. Some say she was born with a magnifying glass in one hand a Nancy Drew book in the other.
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I just watched my wife clear cereal boxes off the breakfast table. This got me thinking about my kids’ favorite morning repast, Lucky Charms, which we hardly ever have in the house because I’m a tightwad who only buys name-brand cereal when it’s on sale plus it’s double-coupon week plus the box includes “20% MORE FREE!” Yeah, that pretty much means my kids eat Lucky Charms like once every five years. But I digress. Let me explain what all this has to do with today’s blog post.
Second, change is good, but it’s also okay to stick with what works. Lucky Charms have been sugar-loading kids since 1964. The marshmallows get tweaked around to keep things new (blue diamonds added in 1975, purple horseshoes in 1984, etc.). In 2005, they began making Chocolate Lucky Charms. And sometimes you’ll see special-edition versions, such as Winter Lucky Charms. But still . . . they’re Lucky Charms. If I went out and bought a box today, the cereal would pretty much taste the same as what I begged my mom to buy when I was a kid. General Mills has a recipe, and it works. And writing a novel has a recipe, too: some form of conflict that will move each scene forward, the inclusion of a character arc that reflects a protagonist’s growth throughout the story, and so on. Play with the recipe. Tweak it to make your story unique. But don’t lose sight of the basic ingredients that every story needs. It isn’t formulaic writing. It’s good writing.
