Including Easter Eggs in Stories – A Guest Post by Daniel Ausema
I've been thinking recently about how an author’s work can refer to and interact with other stories they’ve written. Easter eggs, if you will. I’m reading Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa, a semiautobiographical novel set in 1950s Lima. One strand of the story is about Mario’s coworker, who writes radio serials. So the novel alternates chapters between young Mario with chapters that tell the stories from those serials themselves. One of those serials, I was surprised to discover, centers on a character I’d read about in another of Vargas Llosa’s novels, Death in the Andes. (Wikipedia…