Because of Mr. Terupt
Because of Mr. Terupt
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Rob Buyea on Because of Mr. Terupt
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A teacher who wouldn’t practice what he preachedBuyea came to writing through a professional embarrassment: he was asking his third- and fourth-grade students to do something he wasn’t doing himself. The decision to start writing was, in his telling, less an artistic impulse than a correction of that hypocrisy.
I charged myself with the challenge that if I was to help [my students] become lifelong, passionate readers and passionate writers, then I had to be a passionate reader and writer first. So, I began reading books wildly, just as many as I could get my hands on. And shortly after that, I began working as a writer. I dedicate this book, Because of Mr. Terupt, to my former third- and fourth-grade students, because it’s because of them that I began writing.
He was already deep into a separate, dystopian manuscript about a character named Fenner when seven new characters forced their way in. He resisted: as a beginning writer, he didn’t think he could carry two projects at once. The characters didn’t care. What finally unlocked the story was an ordinary afternoon in a garden, far from any classroom.
I was in my mother’s garden. I’m not a gardener. I think this was maybe a day when I was being a good son and helping my mom... I was thinking about the school year, my students, the projects we had done, the things that had happened along the way. All of a sudden, I had these characters come to me... All seven showed up, telling me about the first day of school.
From that afternoon, it still took six years to reach publication. A family move, a career shift from elementary school to high school biology at a boarding school, and a third daughter born into an already loud household all intervened before the manuscript found its way to print.
How he wrote it
A grid, a cheat sheet, and a last page written firstThe book’s seven-narrator structure, in which each of the seven fifth-graders takes turns telling the story of Mr. Terupt’s year, wasn’t a decision Buyea made at a desk. He credits an audiobook he’d encountered years earlier, without realizing at the time that it was shaping anything.
The first story I listened to that featured several readers was Bat 6, written by Virginia Euwer Wolff. I loved hearing the different voices, and though I had no idea at the time, I believe this listening experience influenced my writing. I don’t know if I ever would’ve tried or even thought to write a story from several characters’ points of view.
Once he committed to seven narrators, he needed a way to keep them from colliding or going silent for too long. His solution was a planning grid: characters listed down one side, chapters across the top. He described the method in a video interview as playing battleship, filling in squares as he went, leaving others open for later. [paraphrased from audio] Writing, not planning, was how he found what to put in the empty boxes.
As I was writing Luke’s opening chapter, I had him talking about the Dollar Word project... that’s when I came up with the idea for him sharing Dollar Words throughout the book. I didn’t know I was going to do that until writing his opening chapter. And once I had that figured out... I went ahead and wrote the last page in that first book before I had 10 pages done. I knew that Luke would end the story the way that he does. [paraphrased from audio]
The dollar word challenge — a classroom game in which words with letter values totaling exactly one hundred cents win a prize — came straight from Buyea’s own teaching. A student named Ryan took the challenge home, and Ryan’s father, a computer programmer, returned the next day with a double-sided printout of every dollar word in the dictionary. That printout traveled with the manuscript for years.
And so I took that piece of paper and I kept it. I kept it, and I had it in my writing folder. And as I was working on the story, whenever it felt like it was time for a dollar word, I would pull out that cheat sheet that I ended up with thanks to Ryan and his father. I would scan that cheat sheet, and sure enough, I would find the perfect word that worked.
One craft choice that ran through every book in the series was a deliberate silence around physical appearance. Buyea made the decision early and kept it.
I rarely tell my reader exactly what my character looks like. That hasn’t changed. It’s up to my reader to picture them any way they want. Trust me, they are visualized in all sorts of different ways.
The personal thread
Six years of life between the garden and the shelfBuyea has been open about the chaotic window in which the manuscript was written, and the list of upheavals he catalogues makes the book’s eventual existence feel unlikely.
Six years. In the midst of writing this story, several other big events took place in my life. We moved from Connecticut to Massachusetts and I went from teaching third grade to high school biology. My third daughter was born, joining our three-year-old and sixteen-month-old. Things were busy.
thesecretdmsfilesoffairdaymorrow.blogspot.com, “The Secret Files of Fairday Morrow: Author Interview with Rob Buyea”He wanted to write a book his own students could inhabit as listeners, not just readers. That ambition came from watching what happened in his classroom during read-aloud time, and it shaped how he paced scenes and planted questions.
I loved when my students wanted me to stop in the midst of a story so they could share connections, questions, and predictions. I also loved it when something came up in the story that made my students think. Great discussions always followed. And of course, I loved it when the kids begged me not to stop. I wanted those read-aloud moments to be possible with my Mr. Terupt books.
What he wants us to sit with
What you don’t know about the kid next to youBuyea built the book so that first impressions of each narrator accumulate and then collapse. Alexia reads as cruel; Jeffrey reads as distant. Both require revision once readers learn what is happening at home. He didn’t set out to engineer that effect consciously, but in a video interview he named the lesson it produces as the one he most wants readers to keep.
I think that hopefully one important takeaway with that book is that you come to realize we shouldn’t be so quick to judge one another, especially when you don’t know everything about each other. [paraphrased from audio]
The collaborative classroom sequences — where Mr. Terupt designs group projects that force his students to actually depend on each other — carried a specific message Buyea wanted on the page, about what children in a room together are capable of offering when adults pay attention.
I guess that’s one message in the book, is to really try to take time and understand how much children in a classroom like that have to offer and how much love they give to the world and to the people that are a part of their life.
When he steps back from theme and speaks directly to the experience he hopes readers have, his hopes land on three things that have nothing to do with each other on the surface but converge on one idea: that a classroom full of people is a fuller world than it looks from any single desk.
I hope it prompts thought and brings laughter. I hope my readers realize there’s much more to their classmates than just what they see in the classroom. I hope my readers have many connections — to self, to classmates, and if they’re lucky, to their own ‘Mr. Terupt.’