The Inheritance Games
The Inheritance Games
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Jennifer Lynn Barnes on The Inheritance Games
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A house that outlives its builderThe emotional seed of the book was not a plot idea but a moment of anticipatory grief. When Barnes’s father retired, he spent years designing and building his dream home, and she asked him to include a secret passage: a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf in the library that disappears into the wall when you press the right button. Walking through the finished house for the first time, her mind went somewhere she didn’t expect.
My brain flashed forward to what it would be like someday when my dad was gone (thanks, brain), and I had this overwhelming premonition that I would be able to feel my father’s presence in the house, because he’d put so much of himself into designing it.
That premonition, of a person so thoroughly expressed in a space that the house becomes an extension of them after death, became the emotional engine for Tobias Hawthorne, the billionaire whose death sets the entire plot in motion.
The house had been searching for a story for years. Barnes had pitched variations of the “puzzle house” concept repeatedly, but no premise had ever fit it well enough to sell. The breakthrough came from a research exercise she ran on herself: she used “gossip theory,” the psychological concept that humans evolved to track social hierarchies and scandals and that fiction hijacks the same drive, to ask what event could make an ordinary teenage girl the subject of everyone’s attention at once. The answer arrived two or three days into the exercise.
The answer I eventually came up with, it just came to me all of a sudden two or three days in, and it was a billionaire dies and leaves you all his money and no one knows why. Uh, including you. And I was like, well that would get people talking. So it passes the gossip test.
Once the premise and the house were locked, Barnes named an ambition that went beyond the story. She had spent years giving conference talks on what psychology predicted readers would want from fiction. This book was where she stopped theorizing and started testing.
The Inheritance Games was my attempt to put all of those theories into action at once and test whether psychology could be used to write books with mass appeal.
Part of what made this experiment unusual in her career of twenty published novels is where the idea entered: not through a character, not through a what-if, but through architecture.
This is the only one of my books that started with a place, rather than a character or premise.
How she wrote it
Puzzles in a day, characters in monthsThe book’s puzzle sequence, the chain of riddles Tobias Hawthorne leaves for protagonist Avery Grambs inside Hawthorne House, is what most readers cite first. Barnes designed that sequence before writing a word of prose, and the structure held.
I designed the entire sequence in a single day, and it remained intact through all of the revisions of the project.
The ease of the puzzle design made the gap with character work all the more visible. Where plot architecture came quickly, the Hawthorne brothers, the four grandsons whose relationships with Avery drive the series, required something closer to psychological excavation before Barnes could write them convincingly.
For me, the character and relationship arcs are always more challenging than the puzzles. I can whip up a puzzle sequence in a day, but I have to spend a lot of time getting to know the characters—what their childhoods were like, how their basic psychology operates, what formative events have shaped them—before I can actually make them come alive on the page.
Running alongside the character work was a document Barnes has described with studied vagueness. She built it from her academic research on reader psychology and ran individual chapters through it during revision, asking what each scene delivered for the reader beyond plot advancement. Its scale suggests it functioned less like a checklist and more like a second manuscript.
It is possible that I have a checklist. It is possible that I used that checklist to generate a workbook, which I use at all stages of the writing process, from idea generation to revision. It is possible that workbook is over thirty pages long.
Even the title was a deliberate compression of her research. Barnes had identified a set of hardwired pleasures that reliably generate reader investment, among them the pleasures of wealth and of competition. In a Grammar Girl interview, she described packing two of those pleasures into the two words readers see first. [paraphrased from audio]
Inheritance is a wealth word and game is a competition word. And that’s where Inheritance Games came from. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
Deserving the lucky break you cannot earnThe mystery of why Tobias Hawthorne chose Avery is the plot’s engine, but Barnes has said the question lands differently for her personally. She locates herself inside Avery’s discomfort, not as a puzzle to be solved but as an unresolvable tension between two things Avery holds at once.
I relate to the question Avery is asking: why me? On one hand, she deeply wants to be special and to believe that Tobias Hawthorne’s reasoning in choosing her will confirm that she is, but she’s also aware that it would be literally impossible to be special enough to deserve the lucky break that she has been given.
Beneath the locked-room mystery and the billionaire family drama, Barnes says she returns to a specific psychological function across her books. She frames it in terms of what she believes fiction actually does for readers at a neurological level, not what it teaches them.
I tend to write found family books, where a protagonist goes from being fairly isolated to becoming part of an extremely tight-knit, family-like group. One of the things that psychologists think that fiction can do for us is fulfill what is called ‘the need to belong.’
Before the series became a phenomenon, Barnes wrote the first book in 2020 with a more immediate and modest goal. She was a midlist author trying to give readers somewhere to go during a year that had closed most of the ordinary exits.
a midlist writer whose goal was just to find a way to keep writing books, no matter how many times I had to reinvent myself. I wrote The Inheritance Games hoping it would find an audience, but never even dreaming it would find the audience that it has.
The book found an audience far beyond what she had imagined possible. Looking back from the series’ close, she described herself as someone who had simply been trying to keep writing, not someone who had planned a franchise.
Across the full Inheritance Games series, Barnes has identified a single current she wants running beneath all the wealth and competition and puzzle-solving. It is a claim about Avery specifically and about readers by extension.
I consider it one of the biggest themes of the entire series that your mind can be your superpower.