Frindle
Frindle
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Andrew Clements on Frindle
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A boy in the back who said it was impossibleThe premise of Frindle arrived not at a desk but in a first- and second-grade classroom in Middletown, Rhode Island, in 1990, when Clements was visiting JFK Elementary School as the newly published author of Big Al. He pulled a pen from his pocket and made up a word on the spot to demonstrate that ordinary people coin all words. The kids laughed, but one boy pushed back: you can’t just make up a word and get it into the dictionary. Clements walked him through a thought experiment involving a convenience store, a series of kids, and a counter worker who would eventually give in. The boy got it. But the moment that stayed with Clements was how hard the foundational claim had been to land in the first place.
They didn’t believe me when I pointed to a fat dictionary and told them that ordinary people like them and like me had made up all the words in that book—and that new words get made up all the time.
For a couple of years after the Middletown visit, Clements repeated that classroom story at every school and library he appeared at. The premise kept landing. Then, sitting at home one afternoon looking for a new story idea, the thought shifted from a demonstration about language to a conflict between two people who cared about language differently.
What would happen if a kid started using a new word, and other kids really liked it, but his English teacher didn’t? So the idea for the book was born.
That single question carried the whole engine of the novel: not just what a word is, but what happens when the institution that certifies words refuses to budge.
How he wrote it
Nine editors and four extra monthsEvery book Clements had written before Frindle was a picture book, so he tried the idea in the only form he knew. He wrote three pages, titled the manuscript Nick’s New Word, and sent it to five editors. All five returned the same verdict. He resisted, then submitted the picture book version to more editors, collected more rejections, and finally sat down to write something he had never written before. The Van Show interview at Austin Public Library captures how he remembered confronting that unfamiliar length.
Frindle became popular, more popular than any of my books before or since—at least so far. And it had the eventual effect of turning me into a full-time writer. [paraphrased from audio]
Looking back on the chain of rejections years later, Clements framed the early nos as the most useful editorial guidance he received. The pivot from picture book to chapter book was not his idea.
One that was not published was called Nick’s New Word, and that became Frindle after several editors said it needed to be a chapter book, not just a picture book. I was glad those editors gave me such good advice.
Even after Stephanie Owens-Lurie at Simon and Schuster said yes to the chapter book, the manuscript was not finished. Five more months of revision followed acceptance, a phase Clements described with the particular gratitude of a writer who knows he needed the push.
I had to go through at least five more months of rewriting—but gratefully, I had so much good advice and guidance from my wonderful editor. And finally, we got the story just right.
Writing his first long manuscript forced Clements to reach into material he had never needed for a picture book. The two central characters, Nick and Mrs. Granger, are not invented from scratch: they are composites assembled from decades of classroom life, his own childhood, and his years as a teacher.
Nick is a combination of many kids I have known—both girls and boys—including myself. Mrs. Granger is also constructed from bits of many teachers I have known and some I have worked with, again, including myself. Frindle includes a lot of material drawn from my own experiences as a kid and a teacher and a parent.
The personal thread
Mrs. Granger, built from the insideClements spent seven years teaching English in suburban Chicago before becoming a writer, and that experience gave him something no research could have supplied: genuine sympathy for both sides of the classroom. He knew what it felt like to be the student trying to bend the rules and the teacher holding the line. The result was a character that teachers in particular responded to in ways he had not predicted.
I know that the book owes a great deal of its success to the teachers who have fallen in love with who Mrs. Granger is and all the qualities she represents.
festivalfaithwriting.wordpress.com, “Andrew Clements | festivalfaithwriting”The principle behind Frindle, that writers draw from life rather than from imagination alone, was one Clements applied explicitly to his own practice and articulated when giving advice to young writers. It is the same principle that explains why Nick reads as a real kid and Mrs. Granger reads as a real teacher rather than a cartoon obstacle.
Writing fiction is the artistic reprocessing of experience. The more a writer experiences, the more raw material he or she has to draw upon.
What he wants us to sit with
Words are free and that fact is astonishingThe observation that started the whole project at JFK Elementary in 1990 was also the argument Clements hoped the book would leave with its readers. He made the point repeatedly during school visits, sometimes asking students to imagine paying a penny for every word they used in a day, to make the invisible suddenly visible.
I guess it’s just that language is so astonishing. Most people never really stop to think about the way words work.
Clements pushed the argument further than simple wonder. For him, noticing how language works was not a parlor trick but a capacity with real consequences for how people think, speak, and write. The penny-a-word exercise was designed to produce exactly this shift in attention.
Words are free, they can’t be used up, they are ideas. They’re what we use to dream with, and think with, and communicate good thoughts and bad thoughts, and dream and pray...and you know, they’re pretty amazing things.
The book asks children to carry that sense of astonishment into their ordinary use of language, and it asks adults to remember they once felt it too.