Interview with Julie Schumacher

Julie Schumacher is the author of five novels for younger readers, including The Book of One Hundred Truths and Black Box, among many other books. We discussed the emotional depth of YA, a memorable response from a young reader, and much more.

Natalie Martell: What was your relationship with reading like before you started writing books and has it changed since you became an author?

Julie Schumacher: When I was a kid, I remember having trouble with reading. In elementary school, “reading ladies” would come to help us learn to read. I can recall weeping in the basement of my elementary school because other kids seemed able to decode and decipher things. I couldn’t break the code, and it took me a while. I was the kind of kid who was running around outdoors playing games rather than being inside. I didn’t think of myself as a big reader until late elementary. In senior high, particularly, I became a big reader. I was not one of those kids who read instantly and was in love with books from near birth. I wish I could say that I was, but I wasn’t.

 NM: What are your favorite aspects of beginning a new project? 

JS: [laughing] You’re asking me at a time when I’m hating starting a new project.

NM: You could also answer what you hate about starting a new project!

JS: The uncertainty. There’s a terror of the blank page. If I don’t yet know what I’m searching for, or after, or wanting to write, there’s a terrible restlessness associated with that. I find that I have to force myself to sit down and write. I will do anything. I’m searching for tasks that I’ve neglected—you know, email from a week and half ago—just to avoid sitting down and writing. But once something is going, I dream about it, I think about it while I’m driving. It becomes a living thing in my head. That feels much better to me, to have a decent draft. At least I know what I’m struggling with. Not to know at all is an awful feeling. I don’t like starting.

NM: When you say it becomes a living thing in your head, is that when you understand the characters and their voices, or does it have more to do with the world of the story that you’re telling, or the plot events?

JS: For me, the characters are the primary thing. I have to know who the people are and develop an affection for them, a sympathy with them. That’s the first thing. I guess secondary would be the world of the story, the setting, and the secondary characters. I’m not a plot writer. For me, that’s the hardest and the last thing. I think, “Why are these people behaving the way they are? How can I make them get out of their chairs and do something interesting?” That’s the hard part. But I first need to fall in love with them a little bit and know who they are. That’s what will get me to sit down and enjoy, more or less, the writing process. It’s not always enjoyment, writing. It’s partly a compulsion.

NM: Your books for young people delve into challenging topics, which I think is important in young people’s literature. I’m wondering how you approach the voice and psychology of young characters navigating these darker situations and experiences.

JS: With young characters, the thing that intrigues me is their imperfect awareness of things. Our adult knowledge of things is imperfect as well, but young characters are often deliberately kept in the dark by adults. So, there’s an incomplete knowledge that leads to a helplessness, needing to be involved or to understand something, but it’s being, in part, kept away from you. That feeling combined with an awareness that there are these important things going on and you are not given full access to them.

NM: Why do you think it’s important to reflect these kinds of experiences in a meaningful way for young readers? I’m thinking particularly of the complex family dynamics that your books delve into.

JS: It might come from my own experience as a kid. I was the youngest of five siblings, so there were always things occurring and being decided that I felt were kept slightly out of my reach. There was that frustration, a twinge of helplessness, and a feeling of exclusion in regard to things that were happening around me that I knew would affect me. I think that’s a primary sensation of childhood—that things are occurring and they matter and they will affect you, but you don’t get the agency that the adults do in terms of finding an outcome. You are kept apart or away. I feel like that’s still true as an adult—stuff’s happening, what do I do about it? But it’s particularly salient when you are eight, ten, twelve years old.

NM: That feeling of a lack of control can be very present for young people, and it can also be present for adults. Something I enjoy about reading YA is that a lot of the emotional experiences still resonate with me as an adult even though they’re mostly grounded in a teenager’s reality.

JS: Yes, and the emotions are often stronger and more poignant in YA fiction because those characters are encountering certain emotions—fear, rage, love—for one of the first times. Adults have experienced these things multiple times, so there’s not the same freshness and poignancy about them. To feel something for the first time is very powerful.

NM: You’ve already answered this in a way, but I’m wondering what’s particularly exciting to you about writing for young people and what aspects you find more challenging.

JS: What’s more challenging to me is the overwhelming enthusiasm for sci-fi and fantasy in YA. I know it has enormous value, but it’s just not my taste. For a while I was teaching writing YA at the University of Minnesota, and the students almost exclusively wanted to write fantasy. They often seemed a little disgruntled with the novels I assigned, which were realistic stories and classics. It’s part of the reason I moved away from writing YA. I felt I would have to write historical fiction because kids inhabit a technological world that is somewhat alien to me and not terribly appealing. So that would be the challenge.

The appeal is that sense of the poignancy and power of emotions in that age group. Also the honesty of their reactions to your work. Some of the best feedback I’ve gotten on anything I’ve written has come from younger readers. They’ll read one of my books and send me an email that’s so lovely and moving. A young girl sent me an email that I cut out and posted on my wall at work:

I hope you write back because, I want to find out about how you thought of this great book. I would have more to talk about but, I don't want me letter to get too long to read.

I loved your book and I'm sure I will read another just like it or even one you wrote. If Frances was a real person, I know that I would look up to her as an idol because, she

is just like me. Thanks for reading my letter.

Your friend,

Danielle

P.S. Please write back.

Adults wouldn’t have phrased it the way she did. I was very moved by that sort of thing.

They give you the other side of the coin also. I’ve gotten notes from people in fifth or sixth grade saying, “My teacher told me to read this book. It was okay.” Well, thanks.

[laughter]

NM: A little too honest.

JS: They’re going to be frank in their reactions. And even in this recent trilogy I wrote, two out of the three books really deal with young people as seen by my jaded professor. The most recent one involves him taking undergrad students to England, and a good portion of the book is taken up by the writing that those college freshman or undergraduates do. I’m always interested in the reactions of people younger than myself in any situation. So even though I haven’t been writing YA, I’m still writing about people much younger than myself.

NM: Are there books or writers that have influenced your writing for young people?

JS: I began my first book for younger readers as an experiment to teach myself how to plot. I’d been trying to write an adult novel, and I have real trouble with structure and plot. I read my two (at that time) young kids Charlotte’s Web, which I think is a nearly perfect novel. I thought, “I can see so clearly how this thing is plotted and structured.” It begins with, “Where is papa going with that axe?” You have plot, character, tension—everything is set up in that opening sentence.

I told myself I’d learn how to plot by writing something for a 10-year-old. I basically graphed out the thing. I’m generally not a person who does any sort of outlining, but I thought, “I’ll look at how Charlotte’s Web is built.” Something happens in every chapter. There’s an event within the span of 5-8 pages, and it leads to something that will happen in the next 5-8 page chapter. I think I wrote 15 chapters, each between 5-10 pages, some event occurring in each one, and I built myself a novel. It was something I’d never done before. I wasn’t even thinking, “I’m writing a YA novel.” To me, it was just a novel that a 10-year-old would read, because I had a 10-year-old at home. It started with form and teaching myself something about plot and structure. 

I also loved Bridge to Terabithia and The Yearling. Some of the classics of kids fiction that I was most crazy about were really sad. There’s all this controversy now about the difficulty that’s included in children’s fiction. It was always there. All those books, like Black Beauty—trauma inducing. But man, they were good books. And from the start they taught kids something about sadness in the world, and difficulty, and grief, and loneliness, all those things. I think adults tend to have a collective amnesia when they hit age 30 and have a child, and they imagine that childhood is this glorious realm of freedom. It’s not. A lot of it is lonely and hard. You just wonder why so-and-so was mean to you, why this hasn’t happened the way you thought it should, why your dog dies. Why do these things happen? There are such sad and difficult things sometimes about being that age.

 I remember having my mother read me Stuart Little. She got to the end, and Stuart goes off in search of Margolo, his little friend, a bird. He gets in his motor car and goes off, and I remember saying, “Well that’s not the end because he hasn’t gone back to his family.” My mother kept showing me that it was the last page. I thought there must be some mistake in the book. The whole idea that endings could be open-ended like that. I remember thinking, “How can a story do that?” Still, when I read that book, I think, “Oh my god, he never goes home?” It’s so open-ended.

NM: I think it’s important for young people to begin to understand and grapple with those realities. It’s these forces—sometimes darker forces—that are part of teenagers’ lives and have always been part of teenagers’ lives. Keeping them out of books isn’t helping anyone because it’s keeping people from tools that could help them further understand what they’re going through, or who they are, or who the people in their lives are.

 JS: Totally. The other thing I read a lot of when I was young were fairy tales. I was enamored with fairytales, and those had such definitive endings. Whether the old witch was thrown into a cauldron or the princess married the prince, there was a finality, a door slamming shut, at the end of those. But I remember thinking, with Stuart Little, that there are things that don’t end with satisfaction and finality.

Learn more about Julie Schumacher and her books by visiting her website: https://julieschumacher.com