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 closer to the author. In my review of Naked Once More by Elizabeth Peters, I detailed many Easter Eggs and probably missed a dozen more.
They are, to me, the mark of the author.
Sure, the story and the voice are the mark of the author as well, but the Easter Eggs are like the stamp, the signature in the plaster, the initials in the tree. They are the watermark, forever branding the content with shades of the artist who created it. They can also be specific choices by the author to convey a deeper meaning to readers who may be in the know.
If you were to dive in to my book, The Deep Space Between, and look really closely, you’ll see a bunch of symbolic moments, plants, songs, book titles, and other tidbits from my life. Some were unintentional, slipping in when my brain focused on a different aspect of the chapter I was writing, and some were purposely included.
I don’t expect my readers to see all of my Easter Eggs. In fact, many of them could go over their heads completely. And that is perfectly alright. I added them as nods, as deeper meaning, and as unintentional references to the culture of my youth and life experiences.
Can you have too many Easter Eggs? Probably. If you find you have one on every other page or you twist your plot to fit your reference, then yes. But until I hit that point, I’m going to keep doing it. I already have a few noted in the rough draft of book two of my series and will generate many more before I’m done. I like them too much. I even included one in this post.
For this post series, I will do my best to keep my Easter Egg references spoiler free, because I want you to enjoy the book and not read the end after you’ve read one-fourth of the book like a certain author (Me, I mean me here). I may miss a few. And you may see those I didn’t. But then that’s the fun of them.
I hope you enjoy them as much as I do!