July 2023: Q&A with novelist Helen Schulman 🌴

Jul 03, 2023

Dear Writers,

Happy 4th of July! This month, we’re thrilled to share a Q&A with Helen Schulman, whose novel, Lucky Dogs, was published in June. Years ago I took a fiction writing workshop with Helen at Columbia. She was wry, funny, warm and candid. There were several other women teaching in the MFA program at the time—including Jennifer Egan, Maureen Howard, Binnie Kirshenbaum, and Dani Shapiro. I was in awe of Helen because she was a successful novelist who periodically discussed parenting. One day, she described dropping off her daughter at preschool. She said she had stood at the classroom door, and fogged up the door’s window to get one last look. The detailed way she described the scene and the passion she brought to the telling flipped a switch in my brain: You could explode tiny, important moments and write about them.

I am deep into reading and listening to Lucky Dogs and loving it. The novel tells the stories of a young Hollywood star, who was sexually assaulted by a studio executive and writing about it, and the young woman who is hired to befriend and betray her. You can read the NYT review of Lucky Dogs here and watch Helen’s Q&A with Deborah Copaken here. And read our Q&A below.

Years after studying with Helen, I taught fiction and creative nonfiction through Columbia’s Artist/Teachers (CA/T) program. Beth Raymer was one of my students. Her debut novel, Fireworks Every Night, also came out in June and received a fantastic review from AP. Listen to NPR’s review of Helen and Beth’s novels here.

In other reading news, I loved three other great books: Rebecca Makkai’s novel, I Have Some Questions for You. a #MeToo murder mystery set in a New England boarding school; Nita Prose’s novel The Maid, a murder mystery about a hotel maid who (probably) has Asperger’s, and Jonathan Rosen’s memoir, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness and the Tragedy of Good Intentions, which describes the author’s devastating friendship with Michael Laudor, a Yale law school graduate who has schizophrenia. If you’re interested in mental illness in general and schizophrenia in particular, The Best Minds is a fabulous companion to Robert Kolker’s Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family.

In late June, we held a “Summer Submissions Seminar” via Zoom. Beth Harpaz, an editor at The Forward, Julia Nusbaum, managing editor and founder of Herstry, and Doris Cheng, a fiction editor at Bellevue Literary Review, came to speak. It was a wonderful two hour discussion. Jo Varnish, creative nonfiction editor at X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, did a separate Q&A via Zoom. You can read stories written and edited by these editors below under “Juicy Reads.”

This month, we are headed to New Hampshire to run a four-day writing retreat at Cranberry Meadow Farm. Enjoy the fireworks. See you in August.

What is your writing process?

It's not terribly elaborate, I'm afraid. I write on my bed (I don't have a desk or office in our apartment). I drink peppermint tea and I use a computer because even I cannot read my own handwriting!

Do you write by hand? Type from notes? Develop an outline?

I usually write from an idea, a good first sentence, something that allows me a way in. I may not yet know who or how many characters are going to be narrating at the beginning—that takes time, and I need to develop a rhythm, but once the story is launched (could be I need a good forty to seventy pages under my belt) I'll sit back and try to develop the shape and math of the novel. What I mean by that is, how often and for how long will some characters carry the story baton and when will they pass it? I found out the hard way working on my 1998 novel The Revisionist that it wasn't enough to know how to get into a story; you also need to know how to get out of it, or you can get lost in the weeds. That's what happened to me when I was writing that one. It became a little like Vietnam: Why was I there? Where was I going? What would victory look like? It took seven years and the help of a private editor to finally finish, and I vowed to myself after that that I would have a better plan. That's where the math came in. Come With Me, my previous book, was written in three parts of six sections each, and there was a symmetry to the POV shifts. My new book, Lucky Dogs, was written in five sections, set in five different locations, with two dueling narrators. Once I knew that much, it was in a way easy to write. I had made myself a map.

If you’re writing a book, did you first come up with an outline or table of contents?

I don't do either. I do however sometimes write out a list of key scenes I want to write, and I hope to find an ending early on to write towards, although sometimes that doesn't happen. When I was younger I used to draw the shapes of my stories and chapters to see how they fit together as a puzzle piece. There was a period of time when I used timelines on poster board and when I got new ideas I squeezed them in between the scenes. Sometimes an idea will come to me while I'm walking and I'll stop and type it into my phone and send it to myself. Napkins in restaurants or bars and a borrowed pen can serve the same purpose. I've been known to jot notes on the back of my hand.

Do you have a regular writing practice? If so, describe it. (For instance, do you write first thing in the morning for at least one hour? Commit to writing 1,000 words a day? Journal for 15 minutes and see what happens? Write late at night, after everyone has gone to bed? )

Pre-Covid my favorite kind of writing day would be a walk across the park to my gym and then a walk and a coffee home. By the time I sat down to my computer I'd been writing in my head for hours. Now, I work out online. I have some peppermint tea, read various newspapers on my phone, workout and then climb back into bed to write. I have to steal my walks later in the day when I get them.

Where do you write? (Bed, desk, kitchen table, coffee shop, etc.) Standing up? Sitting down?

As I said, I usually write in bed. I'm not sure I'm fully sitting up. I think you'd call it "lounging."

What books or stories or essays have you read recently that have inspired you?

Recently I've been reading a series of Yiddish novelists, all women, who have finally been translated into English. I love these books—most are about young women making their way alone to NYC, refugees from the sweeping tragedies of Europe. They are often lonely and often trying to figure how to fend-off skirt-chasing men, even as they are driven by their own passions and needs. One I particularly admired was Diary of a Lonely Girl, or The Battle against Free Love, by Miriam Karpilove. Three friends of mine, J. Mae Barizo, Matthew Zapruder and Jennifer Grotz, have recently published collections of poetry, or in Matthew's case a memoir about writing a single poem. So I have been enjoying poetry again after a long time of not reading much of it. I was so busy researching and writing Lucky Dogs.

Do you read actual books, read on Kindle, read on Audible, borrow from library?

I buy books. I am also a member of The Society Library, a literary sanctuary in Manhattan.The name sounds snooty, but it's not, and it's not expensive. It is a beautiful, old building with wonderful collections, and some comfy chairs. It reminds me of being back in college.

Which writers do you turn to for inspiration?

When I lose all hope I reread the Collected Stories of John Cheever.

If you have an agent, how did you find this person? Or how did this person find you?

I do have an agent. I deeply love him. An old friend introduced us.

If you have had a story, essay or book published recently, how many drafts did you revise before you finally submitted it? How many hours/months/years (roughly) did you spend on it?

My novel Lucky Dogs probably took me about three years to write and then, I don't know, close to a year to edit. I stopped counting many years ago—I don't count time between books, pages, calories, my money in the bank—it just wasn't getting me anywhere. So I don't exactly know how long this one took or how much revising I did, but it was a lot, the revising part. I revise constantly, even when composing my first draft. I usually start at page one everyday until that becomes too unwieldy and then I jump ahead to page 10 to start the day and then 20 and so on, always rewriting as a warm up to the day's new yield.

What are you working on now?

I have a contract for a collection of stories I am supposed to be working on, but I'm too nervous about my novel publishing to produce much. Shhhhh.

Helen Schulman is the author of the novels Come With Me, This Beautiful Life, A Day At The Beach, P.S., The Revisionist and Out Of Time, and the short story collection Not A Free Show. P.S. was also made into a feature film starring Laura Linney and was written by Helen Schulman and Dylan Kidd. She co-edited, along with Jill Bialosky, the anthology Wanting A Child. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such places as Vanity Fair, Time, Vogue, GQ, The New York Times Book Review and The Paris Review.

Schulman is presently the Fiction Chair of the Creative Writing Program at The New School, where she is a tenured Professor. She also serves as Executive Director for WriteOn NYC, a fellowship program that provides free creative writing instruction to underserved New York City school children.

Photo credit: Denise Bosco