Easter Eggs

I wish I was clever enough to hide Easter eggs in my novel deliberately. How proud of myself I would be! But no. It has some, but they showed up by accident.

Often, I would head down the road to writing a new scene, often a surprise, but abandon it for whatever reason. Either it felt too unrealistic or too on-the-nose, so I dismissed it. More often. it was a good scene opener, but I had nowhere to take it, or it would have taken me somewhere I didn't want to go with the story.

But instead of deleting that opening line, I just left it there...alone. And I never explained it later. I kind of like that.

Three of those Easter eggs spring to mind:

1. Leah invites her former flame's bandmates to form a new band with her for...reasons. He's quit the music biz and bought a small business, so it wasn't as if she stole them from him. The new band's debut performance is wildly successful. As the last number of the set is ending, she thinks she sees a redheaded, red-bearded man standing inside the entrance, but by the time she sets her guitar down and looks up again, he's gone.

2. Leah's first mini-tour with her three new players does not start out auspiciously. They arrive in town too early to check into the hotel, but they're exhausted from their 14-hour drive. The desk clerk is adamant that they can't check in until 2:30, regardless of whether rooms are available or not. One of the guys suggests they bunk out in the park they passed, so the guys pull out their travel blankets and each finds a picnic table, whereas Leah never brought a blanket, so she lies down in the back seat, shivering inside her jacket. She dozes off for a few minutes, then awakens to find a blanket over her.

3. She's about to leave Nashville for good. She'd be gone already, except she had to deal with Paula's crisis. After a long night with Paula, she returns to her apartment and falls asleep. When she wakes up, she realizes she's slept through the whole day, and now the sky is dark. Since she's already packed everything away and she's hungry, she decides to walk five blocks to the convenience store. As she steps outside, she sees a cowboy-hatted man walking toward the apartment building, and she remarks to herself that cowboys don't scare her; everything else does. She turns in the opposite direction and starts walking.

 

The first scenario, I intended as a one-off. It's clear by the man's description (oh, look ~ a description!) who he is. Why did he show up? Did he have a change of heart and want to get back together? Or was the curiosity just too much for him? Did he want to be clear in his mind that she'd moved on with her life? No answer exists. 

In the blanket scene, obviously one of the guys is a real sweetheart, but it's never brought up again. I considered having Mick later come down with a case of the sneezes, but I've been accused of being too obvious with some of my other stories, so I left it alone.

The cowboy-hatted man outside her apartment building is Mick, who's come back to rekindle their relationship. This "egg" might be a bit too obscure. I will need to make reference somewhere that he wears a cowboy hat (duh). Easy enough. That little detail aside, I like how Leah walks away, oblivious to the fact that the love of her life has returned.

In a bout of stupidity, I actually wrote a whole scene in which she's packing up her car the next morning to leave when he shows up again and they reunite. He even says he came by the night before, but she wasn't home. I deleted it. It would have totally ruined the story; essentially ended it. As it turned out, there was tons of story left once I got rid of that faux pas.

Heaven forbid that I telegraph the story! I got dinged on that before. I also prefer a bit of mystery, tiny though it may be. 

I guess the key to Easter eggs, if you're a run-of-the-mill writer, is to leave them by accident.