The idea for the "slowing" first came to Walker when she read that the 2004 Indonesia tsunami had caused the Earth's rotation to slow by some fractions of a second. Walker started researching the effects of a more large-scale slowing, mostly on the Internet, but also had it verified by an astrophysicist. As she was working full-time as an editor at Simon &amp; Schuster, she took to writing the story in mornings. Although it took her four years to complete the book, Walker enjoyed writing this way, calling it a "type of meditation." Walker has said that "Blindness" by José Saramago was one of the books that inspired her to write "The Age of Miracles".