The Unteachables
The Unteachables
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Gordon Korman on The Unteachables
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
The label that follows a kid everywhereKorman has spent decades walking into schools and watching how institutions sort students into categories they rarely escape. That fieldwork, not a single eureka moment, is what generated the premise of a class the school has abandoned and a teacher counting days to retirement.
I do a lot of school visits, which is great market research. I’ve seen how the word ‘gifted’ is often kicked around. Kids who make it into those special programs are certainly proficient in some ways, but in other ways they may lag behind other kids in the school. I was wondering what would happen if a kid who was not academically gifted suddenly got thrown in that mix.
He said this in 2012 about Ungifted, seven years before The Unteachables arrived. The question he was asking then, what happens when a label stops matching the person wearing it, runs directly into Room 117.
The school visits do more than confirm his instincts about labeling. They supply the raw material for entire books. A 2018 newspaper account found him explaining to a room of sixth graders how a student’s offhand question during an assembly once produced a new trilogy on the spot.
I still try to think from the kids’ perspective. I still think of the characters as younger versions of myself more than I do as, say, my little kids.
That posture, identifying with the students rather than observing them from a distance, is why the nine narrators in The Unteachables read as distinct people rather than types assembled to illustrate a theme.
How he wrote it
Climax first, then everything elseBefore a single chapter of The Unteachables existed, Korman already knew how it ended. He has described his method as working backward from the destination, which means the book’s final scene is the anchor around which every earlier chapter is arranged.
I plan the whole book before I write a single word. I can make changes, even add and subtract events and people, but the story must be there before I start to write. My technique is to plan the climax of the story and then write towards it.
The planning-first rule isn’t a preference for tidiness. It follows from a conviction about how language actually works: clarity of purpose precedes clarity of prose.
Basically, you can’t say anything well unless you know exactly what you’re trying to convey. And you can’t know that unless you plan.
Even with a finished outline in hand, the characters in The Unteachables, nine first-person narrators cycling through the same school year, began behaving in ways the plan hadn’t fully anticipated. For Korman, that deviation from the blueprint is a sign the work is going right.
When the characters come to life for me, I really enjoy what it does for the story and the dialogue. It can add an aura of reality that otherwise might not be there. When my characters come to life and dictate their own little ways it means I must have done something right!
Every idea Korman brings to the page has already been tested in conversation before the outline begins. The same two editorial relationships, maintained for more than two decades, serve as the first filter between an idea and a novel.
I’ve been lucky to have been working with the same two editors for more than 25 years. I take every idea to one of them first and we hash out whether we think it can be a novel. From there, I create an outline and then it’s off to the races.
When drafting, Korman keeps a specific imaginary reader in the room with him, not an admiring one. The reader he pictures is the one most likely to put the book down.
[paraphrased from conference notes] Picture a bored, disaffected, 11-year-old saying ‘I don’t care about this’ to you when you are writing.
ingridsnotes.wordpress.com, “Writing for Kids: A Three-Quarter Life’s Work | Ingrid’s Notes”That adversarial internal reader explains a structural choice like nine rotating narrators: no single voice overstays its welcome long enough for that skeptical kid to check out.
What he wants us to sit with
Humor as the way in, not the way outThe Unteachables is built on material that is genuinely bleak: students the institution has written off, a teacher whose career the system quietly destroyed. Korman has thought carefully about why comedy belongs in that territory rather than alongside it.
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.
Readers sometimes ask Korman whether jokes undercut the weight of a serious book. His answer locates the function of laughter not in what it resolves but in what it makes survivable.
Although laughter may not solve anything, it sure makes the bad stuff a lot easier to take.