This week in flashback

It’s all Jaime’s fault; an end-of-weekend conversation somehow devolved into one of our all-time favorite subjects: the merits of Canadian-born YA writer Gordon Korman’s early work.

Although it occurred to me to write a long piece explaining why books like I WANT TO GO HOME! (1982) and NO COINS, PLEASE! (1984)  and especially 1987’s A SEMESTER IN THE LIFE OF A GARBAGE BAG are so amazing, instead I dug out this 20-year old profile of Korman from the New York Times. The July 24, 1985 article ran just at the time Korman crossed over into more sophisticated YA with DON’T CARE HIGH and was grappling with where to go next. 

From a publishing standpoint, it really illustrates what can happen when learning about the craft ultimately interferes with a writer’s natural voice, although I don’t think it really started to happen for Korman for another few years. And at the time of this writing, he had yet to create the sheer, utter genius that were Sam Stavrinidis and his camels, Theamelpos, the Vishnik Prize, Gavin Gunhold’s poetry and of course, Emile Querada.

Read on after the jump.

Gordon Korman, Old-Pro Author of 10 Books at 21

by Leslie Bennetts

He wrote his first novel when he was in the seventh grade, and by the

time he was midway through adolescence he was a best-selling author.

Now, at the advanced age of 21, Gordon Korman

is an old hand at publishing juvenile fiction, with 10 books to his

credit and more than a million copies sold. Far less well-known here

than in his native Canada, Mr. Korman is somewhat reticent about his

success; many of his friends at New York University, where he graduated

recently as a dramatic and visual writing major, had no idea that their

fellow student’s school breaks tended to be devoted to making personal

appearances.

”I hardly ever talk about my

writing with friends,” Mr. Korman says. ”For a couple of years I was

sort of paranoid about talking about it, because it sounded

conceited.” He mimics a conversation with an imaginary friend,

feigning elaborate nonchalance: ”I’m going to be away from school next

week – I’m going to Canada on an author’s tour.” He makes a face.

Mr.

Korman has more to be conceited about than most young men his age.

Despite his academic schedule as a full-time student, he has managed an

average of one novel published every year for the last seven, writing

most of them during summer vacations back home in Toronto. All of his

books have been published in paperback here as well as in hard cover in

Canada, and this fall will see the release of his first young-adult

novel, ”Don’t Care High,” which will also be his first hard-cover

book published in the United States.

Although

many of Mr. Korman’s plots revolve around the frustrations of

rambunctious boys forced to submit to stuffy academic authorities, his

own flourishing career was actually launched by a school writing

assignment.

‘A Little Closer to Home’

”The

big movies at the time were ‘Jaws’ and ‘Airplane,’ and everyone decided

they were going to write action stories,” Mr. Korman recalls. ”It was

my mother who brought me down to earth. She told me to write about

something a little closer to home. I just started writing, and the

characters became really real. It’s a corny thing to say, but the book

sort of wrote itself.”

Although he

himself was a public school student, he chose an imaginary private

school for his setting. The result was ”This Can’t Be Happening at

Macdonald Hall,” the story of Boots and Bruno, who are roommates, best

friends and incorrigible troublemakers. When the national flag

disappears from the school flagpole and is replaced by the flag of the

imaginary country of Malbonia on the day of the big hockey game, and

the rival team’s mascot, an overweight alley cat, vanishes as

mysteriously as the Canadian flag, the headmaster, Mr. Sturgeon (a.k.a.

”The Fish”), doesn’t have to look far for the culprits.

Boots

and Bruno are forbidden to associate with each other and are assigned

to new roommates – Bruno to Elmer Drimsdale, ”the school ghoul,” who

keeps ant colonies all over the floor, fish-breeding projects in the

bathtub and plant experiments in the dresser drawers; and Boots to

George Wexford-Smyth 3d, who sterilizes his entire room every second

day and spends his time monitoring his investments via the teletype

machine occupying Boots’s clothes closet. By the time Boots and Bruno

succeed in getting back together again, they have managed to effect a

riot at Miss Scrimmage’s Finishing School for Young Ladies, the rescue

of an Ambassador’s son from a runaway balloon, a U.F.O. scare, and the

apprehension of three armed bank robbers, among other accomplishments.

Until

he spun out the tale of Boots and Bruno, Mr. Korman says, ”I

hadn’treally written anything before.” Reactions from his peers were

mixed, ranging from ”This is a great story!” to ”Only a real idiot

would write 125 pages for school.”

Published by Scholastic

However,

when the enterprising Mr. Korman sent off his manuscript to Scholastic

Inc. – ”I found their address in the phone book,” he said -Scholastic

was interested, if a bit incredulous that a 12-year-old had really

written it. Scholastic proceeded to publish not only ”Macdonald Hall”

but all of Mr. Korman’s subsequent books, including such other

Boots-and-Bruno stories as ”Beware the Fish,” ”The War With Mr.

Wizzle,” and ”Go Jump in the Pool.” Mr. Korman also began to

diversify his locales in such other opuses as ”I Want to Go Home,”

the story of a boy determined to escape from summer camp or to wreck

the place trying.

Although most of his

protagonists are high-spirited individualists with a bent for causing

havoc, Mr. Korman is quick to point out that they aren’t truly wicked.

”All my characters have no qualms about breaking the rules as

written,” he explains. ”They do that left, right and center, but they

do have a vague sense of the boundaries of the stuff you just can’t do.

They like to drive the big men crazy, but they don’t do anything really

unacceptable like dynamiting the faculty building.”

Such

antics are ”more stuff I would have liked to have had the guts to do

than stuff I actually did,” Mr. Korman admits. ”I was a gutless

troublemaker; I probably did a lot more with my mouth than anything

else. I talked back a lot; I was a pain in the neck. I’d be the type of

guy who, if I caught the teacher in a mistake, would make a federal

case out of it. I never really was a favorite with my teachers.”

Nor

was he a model student. ”I was pretty good, but I didn’t work that

hard,” Mr. Korman acknowledges. ”It was always – ” he affects a

priggish voice – ” ‘Gordon has the potential to be better, if only

he’d put in the effort necessary.’ ”

Mother Wrote for Newspaper

An

only child, Mr. Korman is the son of an accountant and a one-time

author ofwhat he describes as ”an Erma Bombeck-type column” for a

local newspaper. ”She stopped doing it when the baby grew up and she

ran out of good anecdotes,” he reports.

For

the first few years of his own writing career, Mr. Korman enjoyed the

blithely oblivious self-assurance of the talented novice. ”I had such

incredible confidence in ‘Macdonald Hall’ when I wrote it,” he

recalls. ”I really had a good time, and I always thought it would be

published. At the time, I thought good was good, so how could it lose?

If I knew then what I know now, I would have been terrified. I really

don’t have that kind of confidence anymore.”

One

reason is a growing concern with literary merit. ”I was not conscious

of any pressure to write well for a long time, partly because I was

very young,” Mr. Korman says. ”When I wrote ‘Macdonald Hall,’ I had

all these great ideas and unfortunately there was this thing called

prose I had to use to put them all together. I thought I was just a

person with interesting ideas. But as I got older, I really did become

a writer, and I developed a love for prose.”

Despite

his prolificacy, Mr. Korman does not feel he made any great sacrifices

in turning out books at such a rate. ”I generally could do it and

still hang out with my friends,” he says. ”By the end of high school

I was giving up something to be a writer, basically social life, but I

don’t want to give the impression that I sat on my own with a look of

existential pain on my face, like I was giving up everything for my

art. I was just doing what I wanted to do. I enjoyed writing probably

more than anything else, and I was getting better at it. And I was

starting to think, yeah, I like the idea of being ‘The Author.’ ”

But

writing is no longer the effortless pleasure it once was. ”At first I

wrote so quickly,” Mr. Korman says. ”It used to just happen. Now I

think more, which may be bad.”

These

days, as he moves beyond school to getting an apartment in New York and

settling down to write full time, Mr. Korman’s interests are expanding.

”The book I’m working on right now is young adult, but I’m very

interested in writing for the adult market,” he says. ”I have this

vision of myself signing 650-page books that are too heavy to lift. I

see myself writing in a lot of different directions, maybe doing some

television or film or even theater. But for me that would be a

sideline; I think prose is what I really love.” He grins. ”The

important thing to me is that it’s writing, not oceanography – or

anything that forces me to get up too early in the morning.”