How Elisabeth Thomas Sits Down & Writes
'Catherine House' will draw you in and make you never want to leave.
Catherine House is a school of higher learning like no other. Hidden deep in the woods of rural Pennsylvania, this crucible of reformist liberal arts study with its experimental curriculum, wildly selective admissions policy, and formidable endowment, has produced some of the world’s best minds: prize-winning authors, artists, inventors, Supreme Court justices, presidents. For those lucky few selected, tuition, room, and board are free. But acceptance comes with a price. Students are required to give the House three years—summers included—completely removed from the outside world. Family, friends, television, music, even their clothing must be left behind. In return, the school promises a future of sublime power and prestige, and that its graduates can become anything or anyone they desire.
Among this year’s incoming class is Ines Murillo, who expects to trade blurry nights of parties, cruel friends, and dangerous men for rigorous intellectual discipline—only to discover an environment of sanctioned revelry. Even the school’s enigmatic director, Viktória, encourages the students to explore, to expand their minds, to find themselves within the formidable iron gates of Catherine. For Ines, it is the closest thing to a home she’s ever had. But the House’s strange protocols soon make this refuge, with its worn velvet and weathered leather, feel increasingly like a gilded prison. And when tragedy strikes, Ines begins to suspect that the school—in all its shabby splendor, hallowed history, advanced theories, and controlled decadence—might be hiding a dangerous agenda within the secretive, tightly knit group of students selected to study its most promising and mysterious curriculum.
Catherine House is perfect for fans of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and classic gothic novels like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.
We caught up with Elisabeth Thomas to chat about all things Catherine House, worldbuilding and cozying up on your couch for a good writing session.
Q: Where do you like to write the most?
Curled up on my sofa with a nice heavy blanket and a warm mug of tea. I can’t get too comfortable!
Q: When do you like to write the most?
In the evening, after dinner. I’ll stay up working for as long as I can. I've always been a night owl.
Q: When it comes to drafting, do you prefer writing on a computer or freehand?
I’ll sketch out ideas in a notebook, but any actual drafting has to be on a computer. My thoughts are far quicker than my hand.
Q: Are you more of a plotter or pantser?
A combination of both. Generally, when I get an idea for a story, I immediately envision it as the whole narrative arc—how it will be the story of a particular character's journey from Point A to Point B, let's say. Then I'll do an extremely sloppy sketch of a draft, usually about 30,000 words, filling up that arc with actual characters, setting, and plot points to give it the shape of a novel. That draft is the closest I get to “pantsing.” I let the draft sit, then come back to it, see what's working and what's not. Sometimes I can immediately sense that there needs to be another character, another beat in the plot, a change in setting, whatever. Then I get to work on the next draft (and the next… and the next), both massaging big details and editing line-by-line, eventually creating something real.
Q: Stephen King has a great line in On Writing that says “the scariest moment is always right before you start. After that, things can only get better.” That scary pre-start moment often inspires procrastination in writers. Suddenly, you have to clean your entire house, do the laundry and play Candy Crush for an hour before you can actually start writing. Is there anything you need to do before you can actually sit down and work?
Wikipedia research! I’ll suddenly decide that I need a complete timeline of modular space station Mir’s deorbit process or a list of Queen Victoria’s favorite pets. I get in deep. It’s a disease.
Q: Do you listen to music while you write? If so, what music? Is your choice of music inspired by the project you’re working on?
I love music, but no, I don’t listen while I write. I get too distracted. I want to dance!
Q: Some writers believe you have to write every single day. Is that true of your process? How often do you write/how long for each session?
When I’m working on a draft, yes, I try to open the document every day. Sometimes I work on the draft for five hours and sometimes five minutes, but I just need to open the document. I find that to be a useful rule for keeping the project at the forefront of my mind while balancing it with everything else going on in my life—my 9-5 job, my family, my social life, and my health, none of which I take for granted. I need to open the document every single day, but I’m allowed to say, “I’m exhausted; I’m going to sleep” and close it again.
Q: What’s one piece of advice you’d give an author just starting out on their first draft?
You’ve heard it before, but: consistency, consistency, consistency. Novels are really long; it’s impossible to jot one down in a burst of motivation. Figure out your own working rhythm, whether that’s writing in the morning in the evening, in short clips or long hermetic spells, and then stick to it. Think of it like brushing your teeth or taking a shower; it’s just something you do now. If you’re serious about writing, fit it into your life in a serious way. And don’t get discouraged by all the work that lies ahead; take a breath and focus on the day’s task. If you put in the work, you will make it.
Q: Where did the story inspiration for Catherine House first come from?
I rarely have story premises hit me in a sudden way, but with Catherine House it really was a very particular moment. I was visiting the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, this gorgeous pearl of a museum, and as soon as I walked into the courtyard, I thought: I never want to leave this place. What an insane thought! But don’t we often make wild statements like that? “I could lie in bed forever,” “I could eat a hundred slices of cake.” We’re not serious, obviously, but there’s something fascinating about this urge we have to hold on to beautiful things—beautiful people, beautiful places, beautiful experiences—forever. I had the basic idea of the plot by the end of the day.
Q: Catherine House is a gothic novel with a modern twist. Did any classic gothic novels influence your writing?
Absolutely. I grew up loving classics like Jane Eyre, Rebecca, and The Secret Garden, and fairy tales like Beauty and the Beast and Bluebeard. (Originally I conceived of Catherine House as a retelling of Bluebeard.) And of course, there’s a bit of Frankenstein in there as well. It was so much fun to play with those classic tropes while trying to craft something that felt new and contemporary.
Q: Though Catherine House takes place in the real world, the grounds often feel like their own little, mysterious world. What was your entry point into Catherine House when you began world-building?
I made a map (a vague one) of Catherine’s layout and delineated its various architectural styles to ground the structure in some sense of realism. But I always wanted to allow for some surreality in the house’s design. Ines, the protagonist, is forever going up one set of stairs and down another, through one hallway and into the next, out into and courtyard and then back into a mysterious library she’d never noticed before. I wanted the house to feel material and real, but also like some strange dream-structure that might go on forever in every direction.
Q: There are a lot of great moments that really show the reader who these characters are and why they ended up at Catherine. One that stood out to me was Baby saving the snail in the initial pages of Catherine House (spoiler alert!) only to kill him later when her place in the school was potentially jeopardized by having him as a pet. When crafting your characters, do you see them in moments like these first? Or do you start somewhere else?
I’d say I craft the the characters thinking of who they need to be for the story to work: if they’re a foil for our protagonist, or a friend who challenges them to be their best self, just a background character, whatever. Then I think how to evince these aspects of the characters. Baby is a perfect example; I wanted the reader to see early on what she’s capable of.
Q: There’s much about plasm Ines doesn’t know by the time Catherine House comes to close. How did you decide how much you would disclose about this mysterious substance and the experiments surrounding it?
Well, I’ve always been a writer (and reader) who loves ambiguity. I love leaving doors half open and puzzles not-quite solved. So I always knew that we’d be learning about plasm sideways, that our protagonist would be sneaking down hallways and peeking into forbidden labs. It wouldn’t have been any fun any other way. But it’s a fine line, and I really relied on other sets of eyes—my agent, my editor, other beta readers—to tell me when an aspect of the story had crossed over from “deliciously mysterious” to “frustratingly vague.” When choosing my agent and editor, I specifically looked for people who appreciated my writing for its numinosity and mystery. I wanted a team that wouldn’t want me to clear up my ambiguities but would help me refine them to greatest effect.
Q: Ines’s voice in Catherine House is dreamy, lyrical and full of this biting nostalgic reverence for the house even as she’s uncovering its many secrets. Do voice/character come before plot when you’re writing?
I’d say they’re interwoven. In Catherine House, so much of the story is the voice: this sense of intoxicating claustrophobia, becoming entrenched, falling deeper and deeper inside. The voice is fundamental to the reader’s sense of Catherine, the school, which is fundamental to the plot. But I don’t want to write a book with no real stakes, that doesn’t have some real urgency to get you turning the pages. The voice is essential, but especially in the case of Catherine House, it’s essential to a particular end.
Q: Do you know where Ines ends up after the last page of Catherine House?
Yes. :)
Q: What was the last book you read that kept you up past bedtime?
Rereading one of my old art history textbooks, oddly enough: the classic Art through the Ages by Helen Gardner. It’s cozy; it reminds me of being in school.
Pick up your copy of Catherine House at bookshop.org, Indiebound, or Barnes & Noble. Happy reading!
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