Blake Crouch Writes the Way He Likes to Read—and Somehow That Sounds Revolutionary
There is a line in Blake Crouch’s recent By the Book interview that should be painfully obvious: “I write the way I like to read.” That is it. That is the grand revelation. No sacred fountain in the mountains. No expensive seminar in which thirty aspiring novelists sit beneath tasteful lighting while somebody explains “narrative architecture” with a pyramid diagram. Crouch writes the sort of books he wants to encounter as a reader. And yet I stared at that sentence longer than I expected, because the obvious has become strangely radical. We live in an age when creative work is routinely reverse-engineered from everything except desire. Writers are told to study the market, locate the trend, court the algorithm, build the platform, cultivate the brand, optimize the title, shorten the introduction, lengthen the engagement, and behave as if literature were a laboratory rat being taught to press the correct lever for a pellet. Then Crouch walks in and says, essentially, “I make what I enj...
