Linked
Linked
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Gordon Korman on Linked
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A number everyone knew but nobody could seeThe Paper Clips Project began in 1998 at a small school in Whitwell, Tennessee, where eighth graders set out to collect six million paper clips, one for each Jewish victim of the Nazi regime, because they could grasp the figure intellectually but had never confronted what six million of anything actually looks like. That gap between statistical knowledge and felt reality is what stayed with Korman for years before it became a novel.
I’ve always been fascinated with the famous Paper Clips Project by the students of Whitwell Middle School in Tennessee. There was a genius to their approach to studying the Holocaust – that in order to wrap your mind around the scope of the tragedy, you first have to wrap your mind around the number six million. We all know six million is a large number, but how many of us have ever really seen what six million of something looks like?
When Korman describes the Whitwell students’ insight in his Barnes & Noble guest post, he draws the distinction as precisely as possible: comprehension of the numeral is not the same thing as comprehension of the quantity. The book is built on that difference.
The kids’ take on it, to me, was pure genius: They all knew what six million was; they understood the number. But none of them had any idea what six million of something actually looked like. They decided the best way for them to study the Holocaust was to collect six million of something.
Korman has written more than a hundred books, many of them comedies, but he has also returned repeatedly to history’s hardest chapters. He named this book’s relationship to its source material in a single sentence that doubles as a statement of intent.
The story of Linked began in my mind as a middle-grade homage to the Paper Clips Project.
The word “homage” matters: Korman was not adapting the Paper Clips Project as plot. He was honoring its pedagogical logic by transplanting it into fiction.
How he wrote it
Writing for the kid who could read but wouldn’tHolocaust subject matter can drive middle-grade readers away before a book gets its footing. Korman has a specific internal check he applies to every project, described here in the context of Linked, that is designed to prevent exactly that: a permanent imagined skeptic sitting at his shoulder while he drafts.
I wasn’t a reluctant reader as a kid, but I was definitely a can-read-but-won’t. So when I’m writing, I always have an imaginary friend at my side – an imaginary heckler, really. It’s a middle grade kid, short attention span, easily bored. The idea is if I can keep my heckler hooked, I can keep anybody turning pages.
A recurring question about Korman’s more serious books is whether his comedy instincts conflict with grave material. He addressed this directly while discussing The Fort, his hundredth book, which also engages with uncomfortable historical truths, and the answer reframes the problem entirely.
I always consider myself a humor guy, and I think that might suit me even better when I am writing a more solemn, serious story about truths that are not too pleasant. I like to approach those topics from a position where I can find lighter moments.
For Linked, that approach means the paper-chain project at the center of the story carries its own momentum and even lightness, pulling readers toward the Holocaust history rather than announcing it.
Korman has also described the book’s plot mechanism in plain terms: a school quest with physical stakes that keeps the larger moral argument in motion.
It’s a really, really cool story involving sort of a quest to make the longest paper chain in history. [paraphrased from audio]
What he wants us to sit with
The project that never hits its final linkThe Whitwell students originally set a finish line: six million paper clips, and then done. Korman’s book inherits that structure but argues, through its characters, that the lesson the project teaches cannot be collected and shelved once a number is reached.
Then they can begin to learn what the Paper Clips Project taught us all: That the first step in wrapping your mind around the unimaginably vast tragedy of the Holocaust is to wrap your mind around that unimaginably vast number of six million.
Korman singles out one line from the book as his favorite, spoken by a character named Michael Amorosa. The line draws the same contrast the novel has been building toward: a paper chain is a finite object with a completion point, and the work it represents is not.
In Linked, Michael Amorosa says, ‘A paper chain can be done when it hits a certain number of links. But tolerance is a project you always have to keep working at.’ It’s my favorite line in the book.