Collagist Interview: Timothy Schaffert

Featured in our most recent issue is an excerpt from Timothy Schaffert's latest novel, The Coffins of Little Hope (Indie Next pick; starred review from Publishers Weekly). Schaffert is the author of three previous novels: Devils in the Sugar Shop (New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice); The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God (Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick); and The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters (the Nebraska Book Award). He has won the Henfield Award and the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award, and has been short-listed for the O.Henry Prize.

In this interview, he shares his inspiration for The Coffins of Little Hope, the three most important things to remember while writing a novel, and the subject of his ultimate dream tryst.

What inspired you to write this novel? Were you affected by those occasional obsessive nation-wide news stories of missing children?

If I remember right, way back in high school I was watching an episode of “St. Elsewhere,” and one of the plots hinged on a woman eventually diagnosed as having Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy—which is to say, she would secretly injure her child in order to have a reason to take the kid to the emergency room and to bask in the attention of doctors and nurses. And that’s stuck with me all these years; I’ve always found it so profoundly fascinating, this curious warping of the maternal instinct. So though I’ve always wanted to explore that in fiction, I never really have, but Daisy in “The Coffins of Little Hope” seems to suffer from the same deep need for consolation. I didn’t want to write the book from her point of view, or for the book even to necessarily be about Daisy, so it seemed a newspaper writer should offer some perspective. And as I thought through all these various approaches, the novel started to come together in my mind.

An earlier draft did focus more on the missing-child news cycle, and I do think all that has become a grim source of entertainment for our culture at large—literally so, as an endangered child is so often at the heart of plots of movies and novels. I think the whole thing speaks to our deepest fears but also to our deepest sense of guilt. As a nation, we do not excel at looking after all the little children. But such polemics weren’t part of the inspiration; they were just things that were in my mind as I developed the characters and the situation.

Who or what was your inspiration for the elderly obit-writing Esther? She has a lot of grit.

I started writing the book before I knew who the narrator was; I had in mind writing a novel in the collective first person, like “The Virgin Suicides” or Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily.” But Esther asserted herself, stepping forth from the crowd, as I wrote the first chapter. It seemed to me that an elderly obit writer for a small-town newspaper would have a complicated authority in her community. I think we all carry a sense of our own death throughout our lives, not in a morbid way, but with just some melancholy recognition of it, and I think someone like Essie would be particularly conflicted having devoted her life to the deaths of others.

Esther mentions that she’s “played [the story of Lenore’s disappearance] like an accordion, for the purposes of melodrama....”--but it’s unlikely this little girl has ever existed. Why did you choose to have her existence ambiguous? 

Figuring out the particulars of Lenore’s existence was the most challenging part in the writing of the book. Should the girl be real? Should the mother be delusional? And if she is delusional, do I need to offer some of sort of source of her delusion? I went into the book not knowing the answers to these questions, and I met with a psychology professor at my university, so we could put Daisy on the couch and figure out a diagnosis. I wrote many different scenarios, then finessed it all in revision with my editor. But a similar plot has been played with before, like in the movie in which Jodi Foster loses her daughter on an airplane during a flight. But in that case, we’ve seen the little girl, we know she exists, and we’re just waiting to see how it all plays out. And in “Bunny Lake is Missing,” there’s also a mother claiming to have a child that others claim she doesn’t—but that too is done up as a mystery to be solved. But for my novel, I was more interested in exploring how the community addresses the mystery, rather than the mystery itself. 

Esther muses that “people feel they can be revealing around me, that they can unbutton their lips and let slip intimate facts...” Do you share this quality?

I think people might feel that they can confide in me, but I wouldn’t say that I hear a lot of intimate facts revealed.

In your opinion, what are the three most important things to remember when writing a novel?

1. The most common reason for why unpublished writers remain unpublished is because they haven’t finished anything. Finish the book.
2. Get into character, like an actor would. Get beneath the skin of that character, intuit, think like that character. Your characters are where the most potential rests. 
3. Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t write every day. You’ll make yourself anxious. Write when you can, and when it can be fulfilling rather than demanding. (This may contradict suggestion #1 above, but I don’t think it does—you might produce just as much useful material writing occasionally rather than always.)     

In an earlier interview, you revealed that your favorite part of literary festivals are the [potential for] torrid affairs. With whom would you most like to begin such a tryst? Please feel uninhibited about detail. 

The mystery writer and former soap actress Harley Jane Kozak. I’ve had a crush on her ever since she played a fallen nun married to a guy with a mullet on “Santa Barbara” in the 1980s. But Harley respects my boyfriend too much to allow such infidelity.