How to Write Like Donna Tartt

Who is Pulitzer Prize winner Donna Tartt?

Donna Tartt is an American novelist most famous for her award-winning novels The Secret History, The Little Friend, and The Goldfinch.

Born on December 23, 1963, in Greenwood, Mississippi, Donna Tartt grew up writing poems, essays, and short stories from an early age. She attended the University of Mississippi before transferring to the famous Bennington College in Vermont, a highly prestigious liberal arts college that inspired the setting for The Secret History. Here, she studied philosophy (alongside classmates Jonathan Lethem, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jill Eisenstadt) and developed her iconic androgynous style, a style so recognizable that it led to her inclusion in Vanity Fair’s 2014 International Best-Dressed List.

She graduated in 1987, published her debut novel in 1992, and has enjoyed massive commercial success ever since, despite her personal writing style of spending years on each of her novels.

She often cites her influences as Charles Portis, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Charles Dickens.

Donna Tartt’s books

The Secret History, published in September 1992, established Donna Tartt’s place as a champion of literary fiction. With its exquisitely drawn characters, pacey plot, and memorable setting of a fictional Vermont college, The Secret History is both commercial and literary, appealing to readers and writers alike.

Donna Tartt’s second novel, The Little Friend (published a decade later, in 2002), was awarded the WHSmith Literary Award. With the characteristic morbidity of Tartt’s work, The Little Friend begins with the unexplained murder of a nine-year-old boy found hanging from a tree in his backyard. Twelve years later, his sister Harriet seeks to avenge the death that shook the rural community of 1970s Mississippi.

I’d rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.
— Donna Tartt

While The Little Friend was indeed an internationally acclaimed bestseller, it was Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch — her third novel, published in 2013 — that awarded her the highest form of recognition, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In this novel, a young child named Theodore Decker loses his mother in a terrorist bombing at a museum in New York. In the immediate dust and confusion of the attack, a stranger urges Theodore to steal Carel Fabritius’s painting of a goldfinch. What follows is a rich, complex story of Theodore’s turbulent journey into becoming a young man, accompanied by the threatening and paradoxically reassuring presence of the stolen piece of art.

Let your writing process be inspired by Donna Tartt

If you dream of writing like Donna Tartt or are just curious about what makes her novels so popular, then read on for the techniques of the Andrew Carnegie Medal-winning, internationally revered novelist Donna Tartt.

The opening pages of The Secret History

There are no punches pulled: the reader immediately knows what they are reading to find out. See the opening line of the prologue:

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History

The opening of chapter one depicts the homely everyday life of our protagonist:

My name is Richard Papen... I grew up in Plano, a small silicon village in the north... Plano. The word conjures up drive ins, tract homes, waves of heat rising from the blacktop. My years there created for an expendable past, disposable as a plastic cup. Which I suppose was a very great gift, in a way.
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Here, the author provides an easy opening to establish what the reader and the narrator have in common. This opening aims to provide familiarity and remind the reader what’s of value or at stake.

It might be one of the consolations of a great adventure story for a reader to see the main character return home to a life like theirs.

The central question of The Secret History

The Novelry’s Big Idea course dissects the structure of The Secret History to help authors — whether beginning writers or well-versed novelists — understand their own books through several key features. One of the most vital elements of your novel is its central question:

‍What is your reader reading to find out?

From the outset, the story begins with a question as the starting gun. For a bang, the question only has to be clear, loud, up close, and threatening (beset by obstacles and dangers).

As we enter further into the characters’ worlds, we are interested more in their relationships and whether Richard Papen will come out of this intact. Tartt propelled her blockbuster success with a whodunnit, which bought her time to develop a more literary moral journey.

The main characters of Donna Tartt’s novels

Critics and readers alike have praised The Secret History’s living, breathing characters, each of whom is given distinct motivations and qualities that help drive the story.

The often bizarre and highly idiosyncratic personalities of these students make the novel so captivating. As the plot becomes increasingly outrageous, the extremities of each character’s personality are revealed. Plus, the perspective of the Nick Carraway-esque narrator and protagonist, Richard Papen, gives us the perfect avatar to draw us into this perplexing world of academic elitism.

From his own admission, his defining quality is a “morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.” Morbid indeed, as the story plays out. Richard is grounded, highly intelligent, and insightful. More importantly, he is vulnerable and naive, susceptible to the bedazzling charm of The Secret History’s cast of morally complicated characters.

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This is another facet of Donna Tartt’s pitch-perfect novels: an Everyman character as the protagonist, with whom the reader can empathize and identify with, who provides an excellent foil to the cast of eccentric characters found in each of Tartt’s novels.

Both Richard Papen and Theodore Decker, the latter from the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction-winning The Goldfinch, are sympathetic characters who find themselves constantly in predicaments, one tumbling into the next — most often not of their own making, but as a result of Hamlet-style fate.

The first moment of Theodore Decker’s story in The Goldfinch is losing his mother in the New York art gallery. He can’t find her before the bombing and doesn’t ever find her again. Donna Tartt’s characters, then, seem doomed from the beginning: as though the victims of something cosmically bestowed, they spend the rest of the novel trying to escape from the very condition of themselves. Another stroke of Tartt’s genius — the pathos of these characters has hooked readers for decades.

Creating settings in Donna Tartt’s writing style

If you are currently writing a novel, you’ll know how important it is to fully understand and envision your setting.

Not only does it need to be evocative of your genre, but it needs to respond to and develop the storyline of your book. Each of Donna Tartt’s books demonstrates this technique especially well.

Take The Secret History, for example: Donna Tartt used her experience at Bennington College to create an environment that reflected the privilege, grandiosity, and aestheticism of her cast. This environment has since influenced a wave of aesthetic and design choices, illustrated in this article on Dark Academia Room Decor: Aesthetic Secrets Revealed.    

Cities and landscapes have distinct personalities, just as people do; and like people they’re full of their own moods and paradoxes and surprises. It’s always good to remember that any place, like any person, has a dual nature: bright and dark.
— Donna Tartt

In The Little Friend, the rural town of 1970s Mississippi provided the quietly threatening ambience needed for something as horrific as the murder of a child to take place.

As Donna Tartt’s longest novel at 784 pages, The Goldfinch takes the reader across the world, from New York to Las Vegas to Amsterdam. Within these grand settings are minute, perfectly detailed, and atmospheric micro-settings. We become intimately familiar with Theo’s apartment in Manhattan and, later on in the novel, the dark, chemical smell of Hobie’s antique workshop. The setting is a critical component of Donna Tartt’s bestselling stories in that they live and breathe with the same complexity and characterization as her cast.

Donna Tartt’s writing style: the key techniques

If you’re a fan of Donna Tartt’s novels and you’re keen to weave inspiration from her writing into your own work, here’s a summary of the four pillars you’ll want to focus on.

1. Strong, plot-centric openings
2. Whodunnit central questions; running away from or toward the crime
3. Vulnerable, highly intelligent, and idiosyncratic characters
4. Settings that drive and respond to the story

And for an additional piece of writing inspiration, it’s said that Donna Tartt writes the first drafts of her books entirely by hand. Why not try working on your next scene the same way, to see what the physical act of handwriting can do for your story?

When I was young, I was deeply struck by a piece of advice that John Gardner gave to beginning writers: “Write as if you have all eternity.” This is the last thing a publisher or an agent or an accountant would tell you, but it’s the best advice in the world if you want to learn your craft and learn it well.
—‍ Donna Tartt

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