by Gordon Korman
“. . . and so, starting tomorrow, everyone’s going to write a novel.”
The word landed with a resounding thump in our seventh-grade English class, like construction workers outside had dropped something really heavy—a telephone pole or a three-ton block of granite. Heads swiveled around on necks, creating an interlocking network of anxious glances around the room. A novel? Us? We were twelve. A couple of us had turned thirteen. And this guy expected us to write a book?
Our eyes eventually returned to Mr. Hamilton at the front of the classroom, searching for the mischievous grin, the crossed fingers, or the “April Fools!” that would tell us this was a joke. (No such luck. It was February.)
The teacher went on to explain how the project was going to work. We would have a forty-five-minute class period each day to write. An outline was due the first week and a chapter a week after that. By the end of the year, we’d each have completed a short novel. Easy-peasy.
“He’s delusional!” my friend Mark complained. “He ran one mile too many and scrambled his brains!”
This take was less far-fetched than it may sound. Mr. Hamilton wasn’t a real English teacher. He was the track-and-field coach. Thanks to teacher cutbacks and a couple of maternity leaves, he turned out to be the only warm body free to cover our class during that period.
Mr. Hamilton was in training for the Olympics as a distance runner. Practicing consisted of running to and from school—thirteen miles each way—every day. So it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that the miles and the long, cold Toronto winter had gotten to him somewhere between his front porch and room 124.
I was already formulating a plan. As an only child, I was pretty skilled at making stuff up. That was how I kept myself entertained with no other kids around. I made up games. I made up stories. In my twelve years, I’d given my imagination more exercise than Mr. Hamilton had given the legs that were going to propel him to Olympic glory.
By the time I got home, I knew exactly what my novel was going to be. Back then, my two favorite movies were Airport—about a plane crash—and Jaws—which had terrified me all last summer. So I was going to write about an airliner that crashes into the ocean and everybody gets attacked by sharks.
“You don’t have any experience with that, honey,” my mother pointed out when I told her about it.
“Yeah, but I don’t have experience with anything,” I retorted. “It’s not my fault I lead a boring life!”
“You could write about school,” she suggested. “You’re there five days a week.”
I shook my head. “Too many characters. For every kid in the class, you’ve got parents, brothers and sisters, pet Chihuahuas, neighbors, maybe stepparents. Who wants to keep track of all those people?”
But even as I said it, an idea was taking shape in my head. What about boarding school? That would eliminate all the extra characters, because you live at the school! True, I’d never gone to boarding school, but I was sure I could fake it. I’d been to sleepaway camp—that counted as away from home. Put it together with school and you had school away from home!
The writing was just a blur. It unfolded almost like a movie in my head, and my job wasn’t so much creating it as describing what I saw. It felt natural—like something I was always meant to do. At first, I worked on my project in class like everybody else. Pretty soon, though, that forty-five-minute period seemed like it was over before it had even started. The next logical step was to bring my notebook home and write at night.
I was having a great time, but it wasn’t easy. It wasn’t supposed to be. A lot of kids in my class joked that Mr. Hamilton came up with the novel idea because a track coach didn’t want to have to think of a different writing assignment week after week. This was his way of saying, “Work on whatever you want for the rest of the year.” Still, I think he knew what he was doing. The project forced us to follow our outlines until the story was finished. And most of us pushed on clear through to the end of the year in June.
The result was This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall!—not just my novel for the assignment but my first novel, period. Mr. Hamilton gave me an A+ on it—although he also deducted one grade for messiness. So technically, I got a B+ on a book that’s been around for more than forty years. (I was in middle school in the 1970s, long before you could write on a Chromebook or iPad. Penmanship—is that even a word anymore?—was something you got graded on.)
Sending my novel to a publisher wasn’t a sudden flash of inspiration. The idea built slowly. It started when Mr. Hamilton offered to put a laminated version of my project in the school library. Even back then, teachers were compulsive laminators. That was an important message, though: What you’ve written is good enough for people to read.
Meanwhile, in room 124, the novels were all finished, and we were swapping projects and doing book reports on each other’s work. Everyone who read mine said, “This is just like reading a real book from a bookstore.”
Choosing a publisher was easy, mostly because I knew only one. I was the class monitor for Scholastic Book Clubs. That made me practically an employee, didn’t it? Keeper of the bonus points—I had an in! Well, not really, but at least I had their address, which was printed on all the book order forms.
Then came the hard part—convincing my mother to type my novel out for me. Actually, she was really cool about it. But if she hadn’t been, I might still be hunched over the manual typewriter, hunting and pecking. Remember—this was long before Word, before Google Docs, before spell-check, when every mistake meant blobbing Wite-Out clumsily onto the page. I probably would have given up and never become a writer.
A few words about the publishing business. Adults find it slow. For kids, it’s glacier-speed. I stopped thinking about This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall! a couple of weeks after I mailed it in. It took four months to hear back. And even then, the letter was so full of “. . . we might, possibly . . .” and “. . . if circumstances allow . . .” that I had trouble figuring out whether or not they even liked my novel.
My parents translated the adult into kid for me. It was a yes! I was going to be a published author! Looking back on it today, my life was quite literally changing before my eyes. The person I am now could never have existed if not for those few months of seventh grade. Those should be my greatest memories ever!
And how do I remember feeling about the incredible things that were happening to me? Lucky? Thrilled? Overwhelmed?
I was in agony.
I wrote the book in seventh grade, signed the contract in eighth, and by the time it came out, I had already started high school. Here I was, on top of the world, and all I ever did was wait. I waited for things that were taking forever. My impatience was like a monster that had swallowed me whole and was digesting me bit by bit. I couldn’t even enjoy the success I’d had, because all I could think of was when, when, when?
If the waiting bugged me, revision was a double whammy. Not only did the whole editing process take centuries; it was also pure torture for me. I was an eighth grader when my first book went through revision, but I’m reasonably sure my editors thought I was a two-year-old in the middle of a hissy fit. I didn’t just hate it—I was actually offended. Didn’t these editors understand that every single word I chose was the best possible word in the English language to go in that particular spot?
It didn’t help that This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall! went through revision at the same time that all of Canada switched lock, stock, and barrel to the metric system. So while I wrestled with editors who were determined to undo my magnificent sentences, I also had to change miles to kilometers and Fahrenheit to Celsius. And even that was never as simple as it sounded. In one scene, I had a character inching his way across a windowsill. Can you centimeter your way across a windowsill? How weird would it sound when a sick kid took his temperature and moaned, “I’m burning up! I’ve got a fever of thirty-nine degrees!”
I was frustrated, aggravated, and stressed. In my mind, I was a kid who had written this amazing, flawless book (spoiler alert: it wasn’t, but I didn’t know that at the time). And along came this tag team of adults who were taking turns making it less good for no reason at all!
The irony is that I love working with editors today. Don’t get me wrong—I still have hissy fits when editorial letters come in. Nobody wants to be told that what they’ve written isn’t perfect. The message “Guess what? You thought you were done, but you’ve still got tons of work ahead of you!” isn’t something anyone wants to hear. But over the years, I’ve submitted a lot of pretty mediocre first drafts that were bailed out by fantastic editors. Sometimes I don’t even understand what my own story is about until I’ve fought with an editor over it. I’m totally serious—those arguments are an important part of making a novel as good as it can be. For the author, it’s your first chance to see your story through somebody else’s eyes. And the editor gets to hear what you were trying to do, even if you didn’t totally succeed in the first draft.
If I had to give one piece of advice to my twelve-year-old self, it would be: “Chill out!” I was getting fan mail and doing TV interviews in ninth grade, but things like that only seemed to put me on edge. Getting my book published had landed me right smack-dab in the middle of the adult world, and I responded by turning myself into an overserious, overstressed adult. I was a funny guy. I wrote funny books. And I could be that person—for anybody but myself. Even now, more than forty years later, I still don’t understand why I reacted that way.
Believe it or not, when I first found out that my seventh-grade project was going to be published, I wasn’t that blown away. My friends all liked it. They were kids. It was a kids’ book—what more could anybody want? It took decades in the book business for me to realize how fluky the whole thing had been. It was a miracle that anyone even read my manuscript. Scholastic’s Canadian operation was a lot smaller in those days. This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall! showed up in a pile of book orders. One of the warehouse guys noticed it and brought it—by forklift—to the offices where the editors worked. It would have been so easy for it to have ended up in a trash can somewhere. What were the odds that the first editor would even read a twelve-year-old’s book? Or that he would love it and pass it on to his boss? Or she to hers?
At a reunion a few years back, an old acquaintance I hadn’t seen since middle school noticed my name tag and exclaimed, “Gordon Korman—the last time I talked to you, you’d just signed a contract to publish a book for kids! What are you doing now, man?”
“Well,” I replied, “last month I signed a contract to publish a book”—my face began to heat up as I realized how this must have sounded—“for kids.”
It honestly seemed like I was caught in some paranormal time loop that had kept me stuck at a mental age of twelve!
Then I remembered an interview I’d seen with Mick Jagger, the lead singer of the iconic British rock band the Rolling Stones. It was the early sixties, right when the band was first formed, and a very young Mick proclaimed, “There’s no way I’ll still be singing ‘Satisfaction’ when I’m forty.”
Mick’s close to eighty today, a senior citizen, knighted by Queen Elizabeth. He’s slowed down a bit, due to health issues. But guess what: the Rolling Stones still go on tour, and you can bet that they always play their most famous song, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”
That makes me . . . almost . . . the Mick Jagger of kids’ books! Not bad for a guy who started writing only because the track-and-field coach had to teach English.
I rolled my eyes along with everybody else that day in seventh grade when Mr. Hamilton first stepped into our English class. Little did I suspect that was the moment everything I was going to be suddenly became possible.
That’s the thing about hope—sometimes it falls into place before you even know what it is you’re hoping for.
GORDON KORMAN is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of books for kids and young adults, most recently Operation Do-Over and Linked. His writing career began at the age of twelve when a seventh-grade English assignment became his first novel. Now, four decades later, he is a full-time writer and speaker, with over thirty-five million copies of his books in print in dozens of languages. Each year he travels extensively, visiting schools and libraries, bringing his trademark humor and adventure styles to readers everywhere. This summer, Gordon will publish The Fort, his one hundredth book. A native of Ontario, Canada, he lives with his family in Long Island, New York.