1 Writing Class, 35 Years, 113 Deals, 95 Books

New York Times

25-05-2025

The night before the start of his final semester teaching, after 35 years, Sam Freedman had a dream that he was going to miss class. He woke up with a strange jolt of relief. What comfort, he thought, to know that after three decades he still couldn't shake his pre-semester agita.
The most difficult work, he has always believed, ought to evoke fear.
'All these years later I'm still anxious the night before, still concerned about getting here at 7:15 in the morning to be ready for all of you,' he said, facing his students on a Monday morning in January, wearing the same dark suit that he purchased in 1989 at Rothmans when he was first starting to teach and realized he needed formal professional attire.
The seminar that Freedman teaches at Columbia Journalism School began in 1991 as something of an experiment, testing whether students could, in the course of a semester, produce a book proposal to sell and hopefully publish. The results have proved his hunch: The class has led to 113 book contracts and 95 published books, out of some 675 people who have taken it.
This spring Freedman taught the course for the last time. He didn't want to become one of those fading professors he remembers from college, the types who used laminated notes and made students wish they'd been around to take the class in its glory years. The journalism school does not have plans to continue the class in the same form after his departure.
'The course is an institution in itself and you could almost say that about Sam — his retirement is certainly the end of an era,' said Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia Journalism School, who regularly meets with Freedman at an Upper West Side diner to trade ideas about books and teaching.
Freedman began his career as a reporter at the Courier-News in Bridgewater, N.J., and later worked on the culture and metro desks at The New York Times. He went on to write 10 books, including one following a New York City public-school teacher for a year. But he realized, at a certain point, that teaching the book-writing seminar for young journalists was one way of creating something that would outlive him.
'This is a big part of my life's work,' he told the class on their first day of the semester. 'Teaching this class, it feels like it's OK for me to keel over.'
The day had echoes of a religious induction, as Freedman told his students to be 'worthy of the ancestors,' his term for class alumni. He projected onto the whiteboard at the front of the room a photo of his office 'shelf of honor,' crammed with most of the 95 books that came out of the class. Midway through that first day, four ancestors came to speak.
'If he believes you have a book in you,' said Grace Williams, the author of a 2024 history of a women-owned bank, glancing around the classroom, 'you definitely have a book in you.'
The relationship between books and authors is obvious and glorified, but the relationship between books and teachers is less clear. The teachers behind books are often invisible, not the hand stirring the ladle to make the stew but the hand that once wrote the recipe down on some well-worn index card.
When I wrote a book in 2020, about young doctors graduating from medical school early in the pandemic, I reached out for guidance to Freedman, the father of a childhood friend, because I'd heard about his Columbia course. He shared audio clips and met with me, over Zoom, to explain his approach to narrative writing.
What struck me then was the exactitude with which he approached the craft, the lessons he pulled from his own career and then passed around the room: that the reader should never know more than the character, that authors should master methods before trying to subvert them, that narrative is an equation comprised of character, event, place and theme (N = C + E + P + T).
'Nothing in the class is contingent on having a gift, or having the muse speak to you,' said Leah Hager Cohen, who studied with Freedman in 1991, which led her to write 'Train Go Sorry,' about a school for the deaf.
Freedman focuses particularly on demystifying the book proposal, a piece of writing that he likens to the albino alligators which, according to urban legend, once lived in the New York City subways — surviving without exposure to the public world, and therefore evolving to be mysterious and often misunderstood creatures. During the semester, his students draft such proposals. Afterward, he sometimes connects them to agents who he feels might be interested in their reporting topics, though he emphasizes that this won't always lead to representation.
'He's been the godfather to an awful lot of publishing over the years,' said George Gibson, the executive editor at Grove Atlantic.
Over the decades that Freedman has taught, the publishing industry has gotten far more corporate. And other mentors who work with aspiring authors noted a recent increase in programs that support young book writers outside of journalism school, which can be costly to attend.
What has stayed consistent, Freedman insists, is the need for an obsessive work ethic, and many of his lectures are paeans to just that.
He emphasizes that there is no such thing as writer's block, only a failure to have done enough reporting, or an ego that's getting in the way of putting words on the page. He closes the classroom door at 9 a.m. and those who are late have to wait outside until the first break, at least an hour later. ('Latecomers will be seated at intermission,' read the sign he used to post on the door.) He tracks every grammatical error a student makes, with the expectation it will never be repeated.
Kelly McMasters, who took the class in 2003 and went on to co-teach with Freedman, recalled that when she was his student, he got so fed up with her use of parentheses that he drew her a picture of parentheses, curling up like an old pet near a rug and a bowl of food, and showed it to the whole class. 'Your parentheses are fine,' she recalled him saying. 'Here's the rug they can lie down on, here's their food bowl. You may never use parentheses again.'
'I was so mad and hurt,' McMasters said. 'But you know what? He was one hundred percent right.'
If Freedman enters his classroom a bundle of nerves, his students do far more so. One current student, Ally Markovich, 29, was so intent on getting into the class that she flew to Ukraine last summer to begin reporting her book proposal even before she had applied. Another, Carl David Goette-Luciak, 33, made a ritual of meeting his girlfriend for cheap pizza every Monday night so he could share with her the notes he took during Freedman's lectures. 'You can't go to the bookstore to tell the reader what you meant,' one of them read.
'It's this calculated measure of tough love,' Goette-Luciak said. 'He's developed some kind of algorithm of how hard he can push each individual person.'
Freedman said that he holds himself to the same standards. When he was diagnosed with cancer in 2007 and was recovering from surgery, he took meetings with his students from home with his catheter concealed in a cloth Barnes & Noble bag. After his father died on a Saturday in 2010, he was in the classroom Monday morning with his line edits complete, ready to facilitate the writing workshop.
'As observant a Jew as I try to be,' he said, 'It was more important for me to be in the classroom teaching book class than to be observing shiva.'
Back on that first day of the semester, Freedman gave the class marching orders that were impishly hyperbolic, though not far from what he really wanted out of them. 'Pull the heart of your work out of your chest and lay it out there for the gods, that's all I'm asking of you,' he told them. 'Not much.'
During the farewell session, in early May, he told students that he expected that same exertion from all who left his classroom. 'In your book-writing life, I'm not going to be there to tell you what the deadline is,' Freedman said. 'All that is going to be on you.'