Where I Get My Ideas: A Guest Post by Nita Prose
A dazzling whodunit and a breathtaking love story that spans generations — The Maid’s Secret has it all. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Nita Prose on writing The Maid’s Secret and how she finds her inspiration.
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The Maid's Secret: A Maid Novel
The Maid's Secret: A Maid Novel
By Nita Prose
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Hardcover
$25.00
$30.00
A daring art heist on the eve of Molly’s wedding reveals long-buried secrets in this intriguing and heartwarming novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Maid and The Mystery Guest.
A daring art heist on the eve of Molly’s wedding reveals long-buried secrets in this intriguing and heartwarming novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Maid and The Mystery Guest.
Readers are often curious about where novelists get their ideas, but for writers, it’s difficult to draw a straight line between what’s on the page and where it came from. If I’ve learned anything through writing the Maid series, it’s that talking about where I get my ideas brings me closer to the very people I’m writing for—you, my readers.
It makes perfect sense that you crave insight into a writer’s inspiration. Are the author’s books thinly veiled versions of their lives? Is the novelist a thinly veiled version of their protagonist? Naturally, writers who draw directly from reality are the ones most loath to talk about it. After all, if Bestselling Author X tells Uncle Joe he inspired the philandering con man in her latest novel, that’s going to make for a rather awkward family dinner.
Here’s the truth: like every writer, I do draw from reality—although elliptically and often subconsciously. When I finish a book, it’s shocking to see how the pages cleave closer to the truth than I ever realized.
In The Maid’s Secret, Molly’s beloved grandmother is long gone (“very dead” as Molly would put it) years before the novel opens, and yet Gran’s presence in Molly’s life looms large. Did I make this up? Not entirely.
Years ago, when my mother died, I thought I’d lost her forever. But then I began to hear her voice in my head. She’d answer me in my darkest moments—often with a saying she’d used in real life. Her voice distilled in my mind so that even years after death, she remains my moral compass.
Maybe now you’re wondering: if Gran is Nita’s mother, is Nita Molly the Maid? Again, it’s a natural question and one that I’ll admit I’ve struggled to answer.
When I finished The Maid, I was so certain that Molly was in no way like me. And then I had to face reality. Much like Molly, I can be shockingly blunt; I have a frustrating desire for justice that rarely gets quenched by reality; I’ve eaten the same thing for breakfast for as long as I can remember; and if my desk is in disarray, I can’t concentrate. Unlike Molly, I don’t enjoy cleaning. The only thing I like about it is when it’s done. Still, I love the idea of a character with a sparkling clean conscience who sets out to sanitize the entire world—and yet she discovers it might not be so easy.
If I’ve learned anything from writing The Maid’s Secret and the other books in this series, it’s that not only am I Molly, so are you. I thought I was writing a character personal to me, but readers have taught me that Molly’s more universal than I realized. We all know what it’s like to feel like an outsider. We’ve all felt awkward in a social situation. We’ve all been disillusioned by a serial charmer who turns out to be all frog and no prince. We’ve all experienced grief. So if you see little pieces of yourself in Molly the way I have come to see myself in her, it’s because she’s no different from any of us. Like Gran always says, “We’re all the same in different ways.” And maybe, just maybe, fiction contains more truth than we realize.
