From Kate’s Writing Crate…
As
a reader, I always love finding books that appeal to me. As a writer, I am
twice as pleased when the authors also provide masterclasses within their
books.
Masterclasses take place when performance artists and
musicians work one-on-one with students. Writers don’t generally have this
option, but I have found some books to be masterclasses for characters,
backstories, plots, settings, voice, and/or creativity.
Without a
straightforward plot, Great House by
Nicole Krauss is not for everyone, but I think it is a good read for writers.
At the heart of the novel are several writers and a desk that is important to
them as it passes in and out of their lives.
I recommend this book more for the insightful writing
than anything else. With an unwavering voice, Krauss addresses some of life’s big issues and questions.
…a writer should not be
cramped by the possible consequences of her work. She has no duty to earthly accuracy
or verisimilitude. She is not an accountant; nor is she required to be
something as ridiculous and misguided as a moral compass. In her work the
writer is free of laws. But in her life…she is not free. (page 28)
…Do you think books can
change people’s lives? (which really meant, Do you actually think anything you
write could mean anything to anyone?)…I asked the interviewer to imagine the
sort of person he might be if all of the literature he’d read in his life were
somehow excised from his mind and soul, and as the journalist contemplated that
nuclear winter, I sat back with a self-satisfied smile, saved again from facing
the truth…[I had been] countering the appearance of a certain anemia in life
with the excuse of another, more profound level of existence in my work…(page
36)
Terrible things befall
people, but not all are destroyed. Why is it that the same thing that destroys
one does not destroy another? There is the question of will—some inalienable
right, the right of interpretation, remains. (page 190)
…The
dead take their secrets with them, or so they say. But it isn’t really true, is
it? The secrets of the dead have a viral quality, and find a way to keep themselves
alive in another host… (page 259)
When it comes to writers, relationships
can be tricky as solitude is a requirement for work.
…I
might have stayed up half the night working, writing and staring out at the
blackness of the Hudson, as long as the energy and clarity lasted. There was no
one to call me to bed, no one to demand that the rhythms of my life operate in
a duet, no one toward whom I had to bend. (page 17)
The
life I had chosen, a life largely absent of others, certainly emptied of the
ties that keep most people tangled up in each other, only made sense when I was
actually writing the sort of work I had sequestered myself in order to produce…preferring
the deliberate meaningfulness of fiction to unaccounted-for reality, preferring
a shapeless freedom to the robust work of yoking my thoughts to the logic and flow
of another’s. (page 43)
…I avoided
the attic [wife’s study]…out of respect for her privacy, without which she
wouldn’t have survived. She needed a place to escape, even from me [her
husband]. (page 87)
As
for the writing desk, the descriptions depend on the characters' perspectives.
I
looked across the room at the wooden desk at which I had written seven novels…One
drawer was slightly ajar, one of the nineteen drawers, some small and some
large, whose odd number and strange array…has come to signify a kind of guiding
if mysterious order in my life, an order that, when my work was going well,
took on an almost mystical quality…Nineteen drawers…hid a far more complex
design, the blueprint of the mind formed over tens of thousands of days of
thinking while staring at them, as if they held the conclusion to a stubborn
sentence, the culminating phrase, the radical break from everything I had ever
written that would at last lead to the book I had always wanted, and always
failed, to write. (page 16)
To
call it a desk is to say too little. The word conjures some homely, unassuming
article of work or domesticity, a selfless and practical object that is always
poised to offer up its back for its owner to make use of, and which, when not
in use, occupies its allotted space with humility…you can cancel that image
immediately. This desk was something else entirely: an enormous, foreboding
thing that bore down on the occupants of the room it inhabited, pretending to
be inanimate but, like the Venus flytrap, ready to pounce on them and digest
them via one of its many little terrible drawers. [a description of the same desk
by non-writing character] (page 248)
