"An Easter Egg for Your Readers - How Lovely!"

This week, I'm delighted to welcome Eva Glyn back to my blog. Given what time of year it is, Eva is going to talk about the delight of finding Easter eggs in stories...

EVA GLYN ON THE MISTRESS OF THE EASTER EGG

It was a little while ago when one of my editor’s comments in the margin of my manuscript took me by surprise:

‘An Easter egg for your readers – how lovely!’

An Easter egg? In the story’s timeline it was June, and the setting for the scene was a bookshop. Nothing to do with confectionery. Then the penny dropped. The shop was the home of The Dubrovnik Book Club, but the book was The Croatian Island Library, and I was taking my readers back there for just a few minutes to see how Luna and Claire were getting on.

Looking it up, Easter egg in this context is a known publishing term; adding a little treat for loyal readers in a way that won’t spoil the story for those picking up one of your books for the first time. A sort of ‘if you know, you know’ moment, and as a reader I love them.

Maisie is an absolute mistress of the literary Easter egg and I feel a little glow whenever I discover one. The Worker Bee café is a particular favourite, and seeing it leap from The Railway Girls books to other series gives me with a warm fuzzy feeling every time. Setting the books in wartime Manchester helps, but Easter eggs are about more than locations, they’re about characters and events, and even tragedies; from The Railway Girls into the head of a character in Wartime Hotel series.

An Easter egg is hard to define, but it’s normally no more than a fleeting glimpse or a passing comment. It’s ephemeral and easy to miss, but it has to fit in with the story. In The Croatian Island Library I tried to shoehorn in another one, a chance meeting with a character from my first Croatian novel, The Olive Grove. But however I pushed, shoved, manipulated and squeezed, it had to come out because it added nothing at all to the current plot.

Having just finished Dreams Come True at the Wartime Hotel I have a new favourite Easter egg. Right at the end there’s a comment from a rather wonderful secondary character that made me realise just exactly who she was. Perhaps I should have tumbled it before, as the book she first appears in is my absolute favourite of Susanna’s, but it doesn’t matter because I’m still smiling at the discovery. And hoping that in future Wartime Hotel books she plays a bigger part.