How To Series: HOW TO WRITE A NOVEL with Brian Schaefer: Weaving Dance, Politics, and Place into a Powerful Story About Community and Loyalty

Jul 30

Kristine Michie - Playfull Podcast Interview - Brian Schaefer

How To Series – HOW TO WRITE A NOVEL with Brian Schaefer: Weaving Dance, Politics, and Place into a Powerful Story About Community and Loyalty

In this episode of The PlayFull Podcast, Kristine Michie is joined by Brian Schaefer, a cultural journalist, former dance critic, and author of the debut novel Town & Country. Together, they explore the playful and nonlinear path from dance floors and arts journalism to creative writing, revealing how movement, rhythm, and play inform the craft of storytelling. Brian shares how a part-time Hudson Valley neighbor spent six years refining a multi-draft novel set in a swing district town, offering deep insights on writing across lines of difference, navigating the ethics of place and community, and treating the first draft as raw material to unlock authentic, compassionate narrative journeys.

Key Takeaways:

When putting pen to paper, the initial draft offers but a glimpse of your capacity. The real work lies in returning to the story draft after draft to unearth clarity, precision, and depth.
Treating the writing process like a dance studio—generating freely and without preciousness before shaping and refining—relieves pressure and opens the door to playful discovery on the page.
Narrative grounded in real swing-district dynamics and geographic tensions serves as a powerful mirror for self-examination, forcing us to examine what we owe our neighbors and communities.
Crafting characters with unfamiliar perspectives requires humility, research, and active listening, ultimately expanding empathy for both the writer and the reader.
Setting low-stakes, finite challenges—such as writing a novel draft in a single month—can lower inhibition and kickstart a project that later evolves into a polished, long-term work.
You don’t have to write about politics to write about politics. Let the story do its work.

"The first thing that you write is not even close to what the final product will be... but if you take the time and you have the patience and you do the work to stay with the story and to continue to refine it, you will get it there. It will arrive." — Brian Schaefer

"So much of this book is about examining our obliviousness, and the way that you address that is to really pay attention to what others around you are experiencing, what they're saying, listening to that, and trying to understand it." — Brian Schaefer

"My job right now is to play and to generate the material and to find what the story is and who these characters are and what I want to say with it, and that is something that I'm going to unearth draft after draft after draft, and it'll take as long as it needs to take." — Brian Schaefer

Episode References:

Town & Country: A Novel, by Brian Schaefer. https://www.brian-schaefer.com/town-and-country

More About Brian Schaefer:

Brian Schaefer contributed regularly to The New York Times for over a decade and has written for The New Yorker, New York magazine, and more. He is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Arts Journalism and was a finalist for the Livingston Award for International Reporting. He earned his master’s degree in creative writing from Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv. He and his husband live in New York City and the Hudson Valley. Town & Country is his first novel.

Connect with Brian Schaefer:

Website: https://www.brian-schaefer.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itsbrianschaefer/

Connect with Kristine:

The PlayFull Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-playfull-podcast-with-kristine-michie-bringing-fun/id1676838213?action=write-review

Website: https://www.impactfullinc.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/impactfull_inc

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristine-breese-michie/

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