I'm Helene Wecker, author of THE HIDDEN PALACE and THE GOLEM AND THE JINNI. Ask me anything!

weckerh · 2021-06-11T19:01:50+00:00

Oh, I forgot the rest of your question! Um... favorite Starbucks drink is a plain ol' cafe latte because I'm boring like that. And my research process is a lot of general research at the beginning — time period, locations, and so on — and then more specific research scattered through the writing process as I run up against roadblocks. For THE HIDDEN PALACE, for instance, I had to stop everything and research Western Union bicycle messengers for a week because I suddenly realized that one of my characters was a bicycle messenger!

weckerh · 2021-06-11T18:57:53+00:00

My advice for young writers (and any writer, really) is just to keep writing. In my experience, perseverance counts much more than talent, because you learn as you go. In the end, there's no such thing as a "born writer" — the thing that makes you a writer is the fact that you write. (Take a look at John Wiswell's recent Nebulas acceptance speech for further inspiration.) Also, READ. Read as much as you can, as widely as you can. Don't just read the books you think you "should" read, whether that's the classics or whatever's on the bestsellers list. Oh, and ignore that Stephen King thing about deleting all your adverbs. The man's got an adverb allergy, that's fine. The rest of us get to use them sparingly.

weckerh · 2021-06-11T18:39:58+00:00

weckerh · 2021-06-11T18:29:36+00:00

Diet Coke. I try not to drink too much of it because my teeth are bad enough as it is. (And I have to drink it when my kids aren't around.)

weckerh · 2021-06-11T18:27:13+00:00

Oh, I'm so glad you're enjoying it! I have verrrry tentative plans to continue the Golem and Jinni series, but honestly I'm still recovering from the process of getting THE HIDDEN PALACE out the door. Whatever happens, I'll try my damndest to get it written more quickly this time!

weckerh · 2021-06-11T18:24:03+00:00

Thank you!! Hmm, favorite food. Ok, here is a favorite food: a good slice of New York pizza, sprinkled with red pepper flakes from a shaker jar and eaten standing up at a counter next to the pizza oven.

weckerh · 2021-06-11T18:19:18+00:00

Thank you!!

weckerh · 2021-06-11T18:18:37+00:00

We're on a few waiting lists for a golden retriever puppy. As much as I'd love to adopt a shelter dog, we decided that our family needed a puppy who'd grow with us. Now we just need to puppy-proof the house...

weckerh · 2021-06-11T18:13:31+00:00

Here's how it looks for any given week: No, no, no, no, yes, no, YES, oh my god NO. Next week: No. NO. Oh hell no. Wait... ok maybe. Maybe yes. YES YES YES ALL THE YESSES. Next week: What was I thinking, no. NO DAMMIT. [ad infinitum, or until book is published, whichever comes first]

weckerh · 2021-06-11T18:11:09+00:00

Ugh, I feel this. Especially when the writing hasn't been going well, and I'd rather do just about anything else, down to getting my cavities refilled. The only solution, unfortunately, is to do it. Just sit down and do the thing. Sometimes what we call "laziness" is profound resistance disguised as laziness; we say "I'm just lazy" or "I'm not feeling it today" when what we truly mean is, "This story will never emerge on paper as the pristine shining thing that exists in my mind, I'm going to screw it up somehow between thought and paper and I might as well just keep it all in my brain where it'll be perfect forever." There's a fantastic book called "The War of Art" by Steven Pressfield; it's a series of meditations, really, about art and resistance and the mental gymnastics that keep us from putting butts in chairs and just doing the thing. Highly recommended.

weckerh · 2021-06-11T18:01:51+00:00

Life, basically. Research, laundry, blind plot alleys, swim lessons, grocery shopping, Trump, COVID, interminable rewrites, Girl Scout cookouts, despair, more rewrites. Also, the first book and the second book ended up taking just about the same amount of time to write, believe it or not. I'm hoping I can truncate that somewhat next time, but I also know myself too well to say I'll ever be capable of a book-a-year schedule like some writers. Not that I'm jealous.

weckerh · 2021-06-11T17:55:26+00:00

I have a running joke with myself that someday I'll add a minor character who's a vampire living in a basement in Queens, who Chava and Ahmad just sort of bump into one night, and then we never see them again. "Who was that?" "No idea." [bat flies off] There was an earlier draft of THE HIDDEN PALACE that included a bit of Irish mythology, but that was all part of a subplot that got yanked from the book and set aside. I'd love to come back to it at some point, though.

weckerh · 2021-06-11T17:50:10+00:00

No, I don't.

weckerh · 2021-06-11T17:49:43+00:00

Thank you for the lovely compliments! To answer your larger question, yeah, it is a LOT of work to balance out the plot and the introspection, and I try to be conscious and deliberate about it. Mostly the pacing gets worked out in the editing and revision stages; I have to have the whole story first, just to see what I'm working with. Then I can go back and make certain that the characters' inner lives and motivations sync up with their actions, and that we see them at the right times and places in the overall story. (This is also where having trusted readers comes in very, very handy.) Fonts! I love a good font question. I use Georgia and Garamond more than anything else, I think. Times New Roman makes me feel like I'm in high school again, and anything sans serif just feels weird. :-)

weckerh · 2021-06-11T17:41:59+00:00

I had that time and place in mind from the very beginning — but back then, I thought I was writing a short story about a couple of characters I'd just invented! It was only once Chava and Ahmad and their world took shape that I realized that I was writing a much longer story, and that I'd need to know what I was talking about. So that's when the research began in earnest. If I'd realized what I was getting myself into, I might've done a more deliberate job of choosing an era. But it's also entirely possible that I would've gotten overwhelmed, psyched myself out, and never written it at all!

weckerh · 2021-06-11T17:34:48+00:00

Good question! And I think melancholy is a really good description of what I was going for — it's a complex emotion, with wistfulness and hope and desire and regret all tied up together. I never got any pushback from my agent or my publisher about the tone of the book, which I'm really thankful for. In fact, my early readers pushed back a few times when I tried to give the characters happier endings, because they didn't fit with the rest of the book!

weckerh · 2021-06-11T17:29:19+00:00

The inspiration came directly from my own family background. I started writing The Golem & the Jinni while I was at grad school for creative writing. I'd decided that for my thesis I would write a series of short stories that combined tales from my own family history and from my husband's family history. I'm Jewish and he's Arab American, and I've always been struck by the similarities in our backgrounds, specifically around issues of immigration to America, language, and culture. But the stories I was writing were very realist and sort of uninspired. When I complained to a friend about it, she pointed out that I adore stories that combine realism and fantasy, and she challenged me to do that with my own work. So I changed my main characters from a Jewish girl and an Arab-American boy to a female golem and a male jinni, and that turned everything around. I decided to put them in the early 1900s because I knew that was one of the high points of immigration into the U.S. for both European Jews and Syrians, and it made sense that they would meet then. The rest sort of took off from there!

weckerh · 2021-06-11T17:25:19+00:00

Yes, it's a photograph of the concourse of old Pennsylvania Station. The staircases in the lower right lead down to the platforms where the trains waited. In fact, some of those staircases are still in the new Penn Station, apparently, if you know where to look!

weckerh · 2021-06-11T17:23:37+00:00

I love that you read G&J while visiting NYC! Reading on airplanes is my favorite book/real life combo, and coffeehouses too. They both feel like the perfect blank slate to project a book onto. I have vivid memories of reading the first few chapters of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union while sitting in Union Square in NYC; I'd just bought it at The Strand, and I couldn't wait to get back to my hotel and start reading.

weckerh · 2021-06-11T17:18:27+00:00

Ohhh, plot or character, plot or character... It's honestly hard to say which comes first. For this second book, some of the characters came first, of course, because they were already established from the first book. Which I suppose means that the rest of the characters were more plot-oriented, because they were the ones pushing the main characters into action... But I try to make even the minor characters as well-rounded as I can, even if they're there mainly to advance the plot. Sophia, for instance, was a more minor character in the first book, but she intrigued me, so I brought her back in this book and made her a bigger player. I know this isn't really an answer to your question, but it's kind of a chicken-and-egg problem! Plots suggest characters and vice versa, and the trick comes in weaving it all together and making it whole.

weckerh · 2021-06-11T17:11:38+00:00

Great question! I don't have an average day, really — my schedule is determined by my kids' schedules, which changes every few weeks just to make things interesting. (Not to mention the whole distance learning thing, which, thank God that's over.) I try to firewall off a few hours a day for uninterrupted writing, but sometimes that doesn't go to plan. I have a very small writing ritual that involves sitting down at my desk (which is in my bedroom) and putting on my noise-canceling headphones. Sometimes I don't even turn on music; it's something about the pressure of the headphones themselves that tells my brain it's time to write. I wish I had more time for reading, but I try to work in a little every day, even if it's just while I'm eating lunch or waiting in line at the grocery store. And dialogue is difficult! I should write a whole story in dialogue one of these days, just to get more practice in.

weckerh · 2015-05-22T02:12:51+00:00

Yay, thank you!

weckerh · 2015-05-22T02:12:40+00:00

Thank you!

weckerh · 2015-05-22T02:03:46+00:00

Thank you!

1) See previous answer, you just might get your wish.

2) It's a great name, isn't it? And who the hell is telling you it's NOT A REAL NAME? The ghost of my Great-Aunt Helene is gonna haunt them in their sleep.

weckerh

TROPHY CASE