Writing for the Re-Reader: Easter Eggs

Leaving clues that don’t feel like clues

As a reader, I delight in a lot of things in stories. Often, it’s the smallest things I delight in the most. In this short series, we are looking at three of them. We’ve already discussed foreshadowing — specifically indirect foreshadowing. Next up, we’ll talk about callbacks. This article is about a delight for a re-reader that isn’t often talked about.

It’s not quite foreshadowing, because foreshadowing, to me, requires both a call and a response. Something happens, and then it pays off later and the reader is explicitly reminded of the earlier hints.

Chekhov’s gun is an editing principle to help you foreshadow. If you call attention to a detail, it must matter later, this principle states. So if you call attention to a detail that doesn’t matter, you either remove the focus or give it a reason.

It’s not a red herring, which is a misleading — or false — clue. A red herring looks like a clue. It acts like a clue. But it intentionally points the reader in the wrong direction from the mystery they’re trying to solve.

Easter eggs, on the other hand, don’t add to the plot. They don’t look like clues, and they don’t act like clues. They aren’t necessary. They’re simply a delight, a wink to the reader from the author about something they both know.

Some Easter eggs are external references. They nod at a movie, or the classroom number where many people who developed the project learned, or an actor’s previous role. In books, there are nods to song lyrics, other books, or genre tropes that all act as Easter eggs for readers who are in the know about them.

But I want to focus on self-referential Easter eggs. Self-referential Easter eggs are none of the above. Unlike foreshadowing and a red herring, these Easter eggs point you in the right direction, but they don’t look like a clue. Unlike Chekhov’s gun, no special attention is called to the detail. Unlike external Easter eggs, the reader doesn’t need to have knowledge of something else to catch it.

Someone says something offhandedly. It feels like a joke, or scene setting, or background, in the moment. It’s never mentioned again. But re-readers get something special. Since there isn’t really a definition for this concept, here is mine: A self-referential Easter egg is a line that reads as insignificant, but inconsequentially references information the reader does not have yet.

Let’s break that down. To meet my definition, a line must 1. read as insignificant — that is, not shout about itself as a clue; 2. inconsequentially reference information — that is, it doesn’t matter if the reader never notices. It’s a hidden picture in a jigsaw. You can finish the jigsaw without finding the hidden picture, and you won’t be missing anything; and 3. reference information the reader does not have yet — that is, if the reader can put two and two together from earlier information, it doesn’t count. Two and two, in this case, must come after the answer of “four.”

Self-referential Easter eggs happen a lot in Susan Dennard’s Witchlands series, and it makes re-reading them both delightful and frustrating at how much I’d missed the first time. Truthwitch has side discussions the point of view characters overhear at dinner, or as they walk down the street, or something, that become relevant and interesting two or three books later. There’s no callback. There isn’t even new information. They were background noise. But re-reading is a delight because you understand the background. So many clues for what was to come — 200,000 words later — are dropped fully formed into the story before a first reader could know they matter.

What does this look like, specifically, and why are they a delight?

It could look like an exchange between two characters:

Bob: Hey, I missed you last night.

Susan: I missed you, too. I was with an old friend.

Nothing special there. Maybe Susan had made a big deal about not wanting to go to Bob’s retirement party when she was talking to Mary earlier, hoping she would find a way out of going. We figure she was lying, and move on. But maybe we learn 40,000 words later that Susan and John struck up a relationship after reconnecting. There’s no callback to this dialogue, so most likely we wouldn’t notice until a re-read that Susan actually told us the truth. She met up with an old friend — and started a relationship.

It could look like something closer to foreshadowing. Let’s call it pre-foreshadowing:

The second book in the Ember in the Ashes series by Sabaa Tahir does this well. A mild spoiler for that books follows, so if you don’t want any spoilers, you can skip to the next section break.

At an early point in the second book, Laia narrowly escapes an encounter with a supernatural being. A few dozen pages later, she’s being hunted and she holds her breath, hoping she won’t be seen. Thankfully, she is not.

We move on, happy she lives through the experience. But another hundred pages after that, we learn Laia has learned to will herself invisible because of her encounter with the supernatural creature. When she thinks back on it, she remembers not this first incident, but one halfway between the two. The pre-foreshadowing, then, is only noticeable on a re-read, when you already know what powers she has. And it’s inconsequential because there is another, more prominent, reference that does the same work.

Finally, it could look like deep worldbuilding.

This is what Susan Dennard does so well in the Witchlands series, and it’s a reason to have a plan when you are building a book or series, especially one full of politics or some other plot-heavy events. Let’s make up an example here.

We’ll have a point of view character, Tasha, whose scene goal is to break into the storerooms to see if there is more stockpiles than the king is letting on. Her conflict is a set of guards and she worries about getting caught. Thankfully the two guards are deep in a conversation and she’s able to get by. That’s all she cares about.

However, the two guards are talking about someone named Heather. Tasha doesn’t know any Heathers, so it feels like background — dialogue that’s on the page to make the characters seem richer and the world larger.

Until, say, two books later when we meet Heather and find out the guards were talking about what the setup for the plot that picks up then. It isn’t foreshadowing, per se, because it works as throwaway dialogue. It doesn’t act like a clue. However, a re-reader would delight in this information, at how deftly the author proves she knows what she’s doing.

What makes these Easter eggs so delightful? I’d say two things contribute to this sense: first, we trust the author even more. And second, we feel the author has let us in on their secrets, just a bit. The wink feels personal.

I’ve re-read books before where I discovered nothing new on a re-read. They were perfectly reasonable stories, but I wasn’t as caught up in them because there were no self-referential Easter eggs, no hidden foreshadowing, nothing that could make me think, “Oh! This author knew exactly the kind of world she was building.”

I’ve also re-read books that didn’t impress me on a first read, but had me captivated on a second. Honestly, the Ember in the Ashes series is one of these for me. I didn’t love the first two books the first time I read them, so I went years without picking up the third. When I went back this year and re-read the first two to prepare to finish the series, though, I was delighted. I’d simply missed all these nods that had been there all along. Seeing the pieces that felt sudden to me in Torch Against the Night hinted at in Ember made me trust Tahir moving forward. I knew she had a plan and would take me along for the ride.

What kind of self-referential Easter eggs can you include in your work to entice a re-reader to keep coming back? What is your favorite Easter egg you’ve found in a book?

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