Something Wild #2: Unconscious Influences

The moon is full as I write these words, so here I am with some wild thoughts to share. The times are peculiar and profound. There are currently unidentified objects lighting up the night sky across the river from where I live, there is a burgeoning awakening of much-needed class consciousness, it's MFA recommendation season and as I write letters for former students I'm thinking of what it was like to be young and full of dreams, and as we barrel toward January I'm not entirely convinced we're living in the correct timeline. I'm also in a transitional moment in my personal life, looking for new teaching jobs, writing a new novel proposal to show my new editor, and staring ahead at a series of unknowns.

I do still have a book coming out in May. Shall I talk about book stuff now? Doing so in this moment feels surreal, but that's what this newsletter is for.

The cover of Wake the Wild Creatures is very, very close to done. I'd hoped to be sharing it in this month's post, but there are still some details being finalized. My publisher is giving the book such care, and I'm grateful. What I can tell you is that I saw something cover-shaped that is very close to complete a few days ago and I now have the image perpetually open on my computer. I find myself drawn to staring at it, studying every line and corner, feeling the thrum of my words come to life inside. I'm staring at it right now as I write this. It's exciting to be so close to having a new cover in the world, because that's one of the key moments when a book undeniably becomes real. I can't wait to show you, even if that moment scares me.

Knowing what you know of the novel, if you could guess the overall color of the cover, what color would you pick?

What I can tell you is that it happens to be the very color—down to the shade—that I'd imagined in my dreams.

By the way, I heard that Wake the Wild Creatures is available for request on Edelweiss—in case you're in the know and you're there.

Also, I chose a winner for the giveaway of the advance reading copy last month... and as I did I realized that I'd accidentally gifted myself the most amazing thing when I set up that Google form to collect the entries. I was wowed and honored by all the truly kind responses to the question of why you'd want to read my new book early. Thank you to everyone who entered, and for what so many of you told me—I'm going to keep those responses forever—I wish I had more ARCs to give away! And congratulations to the giveaway winner, Sabrina A. I hope the ARC arrived safely and that you love the book.

To everyone else: Once hardcovers arrive, I'll hold at least one more giveaway here, for newsletter subscribers only. Please stay subscribed and I'll announce that as soon as I have copies in hand!

If you decide to pre-order (and if so, THANK YOU), I'm also thinking of getting bookplates made so I can sign your book from anywhere in the world if you can't attend my upcoming events. Do people like bookplates? Are bookmarks better? Am I rambling?

Anyway, in the meantime, let me share something tangible about the book: some works of influence, and nine beautiful blurbs...

Interconnections and Influences

Three books that shaped the book I wrote

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Whenever I get time with fellow writers, I'll take any opportunity to find out what makes someone else's novel tick. Craft talk is my favorite. (Industry talk, which is important but can be stressful and begs comparison, not so much.) Instead, understanding how another writer approaches the blank page, or finds the way through a plot obstacle, or any number of crafty topics writers who like talking writing can dig into for hours on end—that, for me, is a kind of lifeblood.

One thing I like to know is what were the literary and artistic influences behind a book? What media, material, or book discovery came first, so your book could find its legs and live? In what ways do you see its fingerprints?

We are interconnected. Books are interconnected, human writers are, our ideas are. When I'm feeling that gaping ache and fear about the monstrous things we humans inflict on one another, when I see it livestreamed, when I see the continual cruelty, this is a thought that lifts me. I find the connections to be tremendously beautiful.

I think about the threads between art and artists, between books and authors, and how they can wind and stretch through years and generations—the books that inspired someone to write their own book and then their book inspiring someone else to write, and so on. I've literally been told that my book Imaginary Girls inspired someone to write their own novel... and I want to pinch myself for how that makes me feel, but it also makes me think of the books that inspired me to write Imaginary Girls (Laura Kasischke's Boy Heaven, Laura Ruby's Good Girls, and not a book but a movie: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me), and then how all of us are linked together—the writer who told me my book inspired hers, the Lauras who inspired my book, David Lynch, me. The threads of connection vibrate with intensity between our stories, one story to the next to the ones that haven't been written or conceived of yet. Isn't that an amazing thought? That for as long as humans are able to write and publish books—and, please, give us the chance to keep doing so—this may continue?

With interconnectedness in mind, and the ways a piece of art can slip inside you and shape your own, I thought I'd share three of the books that unconsciously influenced my upcoming book, Wake the Wild Creatures.

One book is obvious. One book helped me throw out my plot and start over. And one is a book I carried with me from when I was young, and hurts to speak of today.

I'll start with the obvious...

Three Unconscious Influences on Wake the Wild Creatures

1) We Have Always Lived in the Castle

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, first published in 1962, is a novel described as "Shirley Jackson's beloved gothic tale of a peculiar girl named Merricat and her family's dark secret." And it's true, I'd call this novel a beloved favorite of mine.

Its influence is surely no surprise to anyone who has taken a class with me and/or has read my novels before. But here's a possibly interesting truth: I didn't read We Have Always Lived in the Castle until after I'd published my first three novels, so its eye-opening and impassioned influence on me came, admittedly, quite late.

Since then, I've read the book multiple times, and I know—due to the strange and unique voice, the delicious unreliability, the bonded sisters, the oddities, the feeling of estrangement from "normal" society, the constant questioning—that it's one of those books that will keep whispering in my ear for years to come. If you know this book, I believe you'll find its light touch on Wake the Wild Creatures even if I hadn't told you. In fact, my idea in its original form was about two sisters, though that did change as I explored and drafted. Now, instead, the character who takes the place of a sister is just as integral.

Still intact though is a nod I want to acknowledge. In We Have Always Lived in the Castle, in obsessive moments of sheer faith and magical thinking, the narrator Merricat buries small items in the woods all around her home, as a way to keep herself and her sister safe from harm. In my own book, there is a clear homage to these buried items through what my narrator Talia calls her protections. I was influenced—shaped, molded, deeply inspired—by Shirley Jackson's magical thinking on the page and the power it can have over a character... and over the reader.

The next influence on Wake the Wild Creatures helped me realized that the shape of my plot needed to shift to allow more light to come in...

2) Klara and the Sun

Klara and the Sun is meditative character-driven science fiction by the inimitable Kazuo Ishiguro, about an Artificial Friend named Klara. The book has been called "an intriguing take on how artificial intelligence might play a role in our futures" and "a poignant meditation on love and loneliness." I bring this up as one of my surprising, unconscious influences because, on the surface, the stories have nothing in common. Wake the Wild Creatures is realism (except when it may not be), and my narrator Talia is undeniably a human girl.

At the same time, I was so struck by the limited first-person perspective of Klara and the Sun, and it ended up being an important read during a time when I was lost and unsure about my own plot. As an AI girl who has been sheltered in only the world she was allowed to see, Klara does not understand the world outside the effective box she lives in. Once she does venture out, the way she speaks of what she sees is oddly illuminating, and following her journey really got its hooks in me.

This is the book that helped me realize I was telling my story upside down—or, rather, inside-out. My narrator, Talia, is meant to be isolated from the outside world, and I needed to really dig in and show that from the start. Once I did, a whole new plot timeline emerged and something just clicked.

This is the book that got me obsessively thinking about the concept of what's known as the "Martian perspective": taking a true outsider's view on the ordinary, and seeing what magic it brings the telling of your story. In the future, when you can read my book, you may see this on the page in one of my favorite passages in Wake the Wild Creatures: when Talia has been taken from the secluded mountainous home she's lived all her life and sees electric lights for the first time. I wrote that in clear response to having read Klara and the Sun.

Finally, the third book that influenced Wake the Wild Creatures is the one that hurts to admit. What do you do when the author of a book you loved has failed you so terribly?

3) The Mists of Avalon

This fantasy novel, written by an author whose name I don't want to type, is described as "the tumult and adventures of Camelot's court through the eyes of the women who bolstered the king's rise and schemed for his fall." I share this one with a broken heart. I think this is a good moment to speak to the difficult and more and more common and discomforting reality of when a book leaves a deep and meaningful mark on you when you were young... and now you've grown up to discover a terrible truth about its author. So much so that it ruins the book for you and you never want to touch it again.

Maybe that's all you need to know about my current feelings about the woman who wrote a book I borrowed from my mother's bookshelves when I was twelve, a book called The Mists of Avalon. (I beg you, especially if you are sensitive to stories of sexual abuse and specifically abuse of children, please do not look up details. All you need to know is that it was bad and horrifically disappointing for her fans.)

I read this novel uncountable times between the ages of twelve and thirteen. I could have slept with it under my pillow. It changed me, forever after. It's one of the books that made me a feminist. It's one of the books that led me to question the dominant stories we were always told and the books we were assigned to read and ask: But where are the women? What do they think? And, through that, as I got older and questioned more, it led me to read more diversely, to actively choose to read books not written by white men, and, as everything is interconnected, perhaps even to realize I had stories of my own to tell and I could strive to be an author myself.

I don't plan on reading this book again. Still, parts of it clearly imprinted on me when I was a girl, and as often happens when you're molded by a book that young, there was much I couldn't shake. This comes through in an element of possible maybe-magic in my novel. A protective mist cloaks the home where my narrator and her community keep themselves hidden in Wake the Wild Creatures. The mist obfuscates the path in and makes it impossible for others to find their community. So yes, the mist of my novel... the beautiful, lavender-tinged mist... I know where it came from. I also think—sourced perhaps from my brokenhearted shock—there came other unconscious nods. Some prominent characters in Wake the Wild Creatures are survivors of sexual assault, and the larger society has failed them. Not everyone can be trusted. Sometimes safety and protection must be taken into your own hands. 

All of that may have been me quietly grappling with what I now know.

Those are three books I consider influences—sometimes unconscious, without my being able to stop it, but influences on my novel nonetheless.

The building of a novel happens over a concentrated period of time, but that doesn't mean that our inspirations only come from the time we're actively and consciously working on the book. In truth, everything we are and lived through has led to the book. Everything we've read before has shaped the book. Your novel contains everything you carry, and sometimes the writing of it becomes the only way you can face a pain or speak a truth or follow a curiosity or see something through.

Now I turn that question back to you, fellow writers and artists: If you had to pick three books (or pieces of art) that influenced your current work-in-progress in unconscious ways, what would they be?

Beautiful Words from Authors I Admire

A collection of blurbs for Wake the Wild Creatures...

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Before I go, I want to share a collection of the incredibly generous words that fellow authors who read Wake the Wild Creatures early had to say. Speaking of influences, each of these nine authors has written at least one book that inspired me and made me want to become better at my craft. That means we are already interconnected.

Here's a peek at the beautiful blurbs that made my heart swell each time one was emailed to me:

My forever-gratitude to these writers for taking the time to read my manuscript (I know blurbing is a lot to ask!), and for seeing something in my story that felt worth speaking to. I'm deeply honored by their words, especially because I've been so inspired and shaped by their work.

I hope their words entice you to want to read the book.

Wake the Wild Creatures

Already one of the most acclaimed novels of 2025, this extraordinary, timely, and must-read novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Nova Ren Suma ex…

Workman Publishing CompanyLearn more about this author

Coming Soon

What will you find here next?

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I'm hoping I'll have a cover to share by the next full moon, but we'll see! No matter what, I'll be sharing more musings on novel-writing, book publishing, and some inside looks into the story, including its origin on a mountaintop in California when I was teaching workshops at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. More to come on the origin story in a future newsletter...

If you're signed up to a Writer Membership here, my next writers-only post before the end of the year is going to be, fittingly, about crafting story endings... And the prompt for the 1st of January is meant to spark a new beginning. See you there!