Rachel Kadish discusses the first pages of her latest novel, The Weight of Ink, how she followed the voice in her first lines to discover her story, the care she took in introducing the reader to a 17th-century voice and point of view (hint: she did it in small pieces), and the importance of “scaffolding” in your early pages and letting that scaffolding go as you revise to find the heart of your beginning and your book.
Kadish’s first pages can be found here.
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Rachel Kadish is the award-winning author of the novels The Weight of Ink, which won the National Jewish Book Award, From a Sealed Room, and Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story, as well as the novella I Was Here. Her work has appeared on NPR and in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, Ploughshares, Paris Review, and Tin House. She lives outside of Boston.
Passages: Rachel Kadish on The Weight of Ink