My debut novel, The Walled Garden, is a book I wrote for everyone who loves books as much as I do. So, how did I write a book for booklovers?

The answer is: I don’t really know! The best I can do is give you an idea of some of my influences and how they came together to make The Walled Garden. One of the chapters is called “Garden of Words”— and I think that captures what I was trying to create as well as anything. Like books, gardens have layers of meaning.

I have been in love with words and the effects of words all my life. Every book I love has made me want to create that kind of reading experience for other readers. As a teenager, I started copying beautiful sentences and phrases and paragraphs, wherever I found them, into a notebook—just for the pure pleasure of the words—and I still do that.

My love of words was fed by great teachers, as well. Lately I’ve been thinking about my eccentric high school poetry teacher and the day he wrote a line from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “The Windhover” on the blackboard:

My heart in hiding / stirred for a bird

He underlined the last four words and sat down at his desk. That was our class for that day; to him, those words were so beautiful, there was nothing more to say.

When writing my grad student protagonist, Lucy Silver, I gave her a love of words and poetry. But that wasn’t really enough — she needed a mystery to solve as well. In addition to poetry, I’ve always been fascinated by old letters and diaries — those handwritten records of people’s intimate lives. The idea of hiding the mystery in the words seemed like it would be even more fun.

In the novel, I base my writer character, Elizabeth Blackspear, loosely on the English garden writer and poet Vita Sackville-West. I’ve visited her famous garden, Sissinghurst, and I’ve read a lot about her, including a fascinating volume of letters between her and Virginia Woolf. There’s a kind of guilty pleasure in reading someone else’s letters; you can never quite escape the feeling that you’re reading something you weren’t meant to see. And then there are always the intriguing gaps in between letters, because some are inevitably lost along the way, and because all the layers of what happens in our daily lives can never be completely summed up on the page for anyone, including ourselves.

So, I needed a well-known woman gardener who was also a writer. I also needed her to be fictional, so that I could be free to imagine my way into her life without the fear of being held to account for getting details wrong. I envisioned her as a garden columnist who’d written a weekly column for one of the English newspapers (as Vita had), and who eventually produced a couple of garden books.

Then, several years ago, my writing coach and I were discussing the scene I’d sent her, and she said that, as well as being a garden writer, she thought Elizabeth might be a poet. And I thought, well, okay, that’s very Vita-like, because she was also a poet.

An instant later, it dawned on me what that meant: I would have to write the poetry! Of course, I freaked out. My calm and wise writing coach simply said, No, you don’t have to write the poetry, you just have to write something that sounds like the poetry!

So, I wrote the “poetry.” I took comfort in the fact that though I enjoy Vita’s garden writing, I find her poetry a bit ponderous at times, and I hoped my readers might give me grace.

But that was just one level of the mystery in The Walled Garden. One of the reasons old letters fascinate me is because, most of the time, you only have access to one side of the correspondence, so you have to imagine your way into the recipient’s responses. Since Elizabeth was well-known in her time, the letters she had received from other people would have been preserved.

I loved the idea of Lucy having Elizabeth’s letters to her grandmother, so that piecing together both sides of the correspondence might lead her to new insights, especially about a certain lost period in Elizabeth’s life. It was also a good way to create further tension in the book because people who’d staked their scholarly reputations or careers on what was already known about Elizabeth Blackspear wouldn’t necessarily be open to Lucy’s discoveries.

But there was one more issue. As well as being a celebrity in her time, Elizabeth Blackspear was a very reserved woman whose marriage, career, and social standing would have been compromised if the secrets she was confiding in her letters to Lucy’s grandmother came to light. Even though celebrity culture in 1950s Britain wasn’t quite the feeding frenzy it is now, there were still plenty of tabloids looking for a sensational scoop. I decided I needed a code that two gardeners might have used, and I chose the Victorian Language of Flowers. Besides, I didn’t want to make things too easy for Lucy.

The Language of Flowers is a system that assigns meanings to specific flowers and plants. Though it has its roots in 17th century Ottoman Turkey, the Language of Flowers was rediscovered by the Victorians as a means of communication in a famously repressed age. We’re all familiar with the idea that red roses symbolize love, though in the version I used, deep red roses actually say “bashful shame”, and a red rosebud means “pure and lovely”. But you get the idea.

Added to all those ideas, I had the romantic notion of a once well-loved and -tended garden that had been allowed to fall into disorder, so there might have been markers like plaques, memorials or statues that had gotten covered up by plants over time.

Those were some of my influences. While I may or may not know how to write a book for booklovers, I can offer a few guidelines. Let yourself love what you love, as Mary Oliver says. Be willing to fall down some rabbit holes. Not all of them: just the ones with juice and tang. Gather the things you love with the confidence that others will love them too. And find a way to write whatever the “poetry” of your story is — even when you don’t know how!