On Easter Eggs & Writing

Why I loved putting Easter Eggs into my novel and why other authors do as well

Fun fact: The image on this post is a signature my husband and I uncovered when we removed decades-old wallpaper from the attic bedroom in our house. It was like an Easter Egg from a prior era. It exists along with the signature in the concrete of the back steps of our house from 1945. Remnants of those who came before. The Easter Eggs I’m going to talk about here are like that, but also aren’t. Over the month of November, I’ll be sharing some of the Easter Eggs in my book, but first I wanted to explain why they even exist and what they do for the book.

Not every author puts Easter Eggs into their books, but many do. If you search for literary Easter Eggs, you ‘ll find a surprising number of results, from contemporary novels like The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (how could he not include at least one?!) to books by Lewis Carroll and JRR Tolkien to The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Even the anti-adverb king, Stephen King that is, has an Easter Egg in It.

These inside jokes, references, quotations, and markers of unique information are there to deepen the reader experience, add shades of complexity and layers to a potentially already deep book. Easter Eggs can be for a broader audience or they could be for those…