Can Literary Quotes Help Your Novel?

Many writers add literary allusions to their stories. I did this recently, and I came close to making the mistake of underusing the source material.

The book I included in my story is A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson. You can read this book along with us thanks to this Project Gutenberg edition. Try it even if you have a print copy; this edition includes poems that many print editions have left out. You can also peek at vintage illustrations of this book in the article Early Illustrators of a Child’s Garden of Verses.

My copy of “A Child’s Garden of Verses” illustrated by Clara M. Burd. (Source: Photo by the Author.)

Why I Picked “A Child’s Garden of Verses”

In my current story, the hero’s mother insists that his caretakers keep reading A Child’s Garden of Verses to him. (She can’t accept that her son is a grown man, nor can she accept that it is wrong to imprison him in her mansion. Long story…)

When I first started the story, I wanted (OK, needed) my characters to interact with a classic children’s book. I looked up titles of classic Victorian children’s literature and spotted A Child’s Garden of Verses. Perfect!

I picked A Child’s Garden of Verses because I remembered reading some of those poems when I was young. Though I must have been just six or seven years old, I remembered being annoyed by how sweet some of the poems were…