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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.
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. So how angry would a grown man get if he were forced to read the book repeatedly?
It started out as simply something that would get mentioned often. A book that the hero, Peter, would be extremely annoyed with by now. It’s symbolic of the way his mother refuses to accept reality. She wants him to stay frozen in the past — a past before a tragedy that broke the lives of both of her children.
It was going to culminate in a line of dialogue near the end where Peter tells someone, “But you can tell her I’ll be reading A Child’s Fucking Garden of Fucking Verses.”
Cute, right? But just yesterday evening, I realized I should do more with this. It all came about because of a weekend trip.
Discovering More in “A Child’s Garden of Verses”
Just this weekend, I found a vintage copy of the book at an antique mall during a birthday trip to…
