The Wednesday Wars
The Wednesday Wars
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Gary D. Schmidt on The Wednesday Wars
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why he wrote it
The kid left alone on Wednesday afternoonsSchmidt grew up in Hicksville, the Long Island suburb where the novel is set, and the Wednesday afternoon situation at the center of the plot is not a narrative device. When his classmates left for Hebrew school or catechism, he stayed behind, and the teacher who had to remain with him was not happy about it.
This really was how it was. I was a little younger than Holling, but I was the kiddo left alone. In real life, Mrs. Baker was—perhaps justifiably—angry that she had to stay while other teachers could leave, since their classes emptied out. But today I think, what an opportunity. Suppose you were a teacher who had one—or even a handful—of students for two hours every week where you could do anything you wanted? Isn’t that paradise for a teacher?
scbwimithemitten.blogspot.com, “The Mitten: Writer Spotlight: Gary D. Schmidt”The academic tracking that quietly crushes Holling’s early sense of his own possibilities came from Schmidt’s elementary school years. He has since named it plainly, without dramatizing it, which makes what he says about it hit harder.
In my elementary years, we were tracked—meaning that it was determined how we would do in later education, and what kinds of jobs we were likely to have. I was in the lowest group, and knew that. I didn’t think at the time it was demeaning, and I didn’t rise up in righteous anger—I just figured it was true, I guess. I look back at that now as something akin to abuse, but it wasn’t meant that way. In any case, my early years were sort of humiliating—until I got the teacher I came to love who taught me to love learning and reading and even, dare I say it, the world.
scbwimithemitten.blogspot.com, “The Mitten: Writer Spotlight: Gary D. Schmidt”The Vietnam War backdrop in the novel is not historical decoration. Schmidt was a seventh grader during it, and the protest scenes in the book record something he actually did. He received two-and-a-half-hour daily detentions for it.
The Vietnam War was a big influence. I saw it on news and knew people who served. As 7th graders, we wore black armbands to protest the war and got 2-1/2 hour detentions daily for wearing them. Two of my books have 1960s settings: The Wednesday Wars and Okay For Now.
That biographical fact reshapes how a reader hears Holling’s anxiety about the draft and the casualty reports. Schmidt did not age up into the war; he watched it arrive in real time, from exactly where Holling stands.
How he wrote it
Two years of microfilm, one borrowed last lineSchmidt set the novel in his own decade, but lived experience did not replace reporting. To get 1967 and 1968 right, he sat at a microfilm reader and went through the New York Times day by day, both years, cover to cover.
I read the New York Times for every day in 1967, 1968. I read through the whole paper. Just so I got a sense of, I don’t know, what movies are out, what the styles are there, what people are talking about, and particularly what’s happening in Vietnam, um during the war there. And that took forever. It just took forever to get through that and to take notes. And it was on microfilm. No kidding. So I’m scrolling through this thing. [paraphrased from audio]
That granular grounding is why the novel moves month by month through the school year, each chapter timed to real events: the murders, the protests, the troop numbers. Schmidt was not gesturing at a decade; he was reconstructing one.
The weight of what his generation actually faced gave the war passages their specific gravity. Schmidt has been precise about the statistical reality that shaped adolescence in those years, and that reality sits behind every draft notice and news report in the book.
Those of us who grew up in the sixties and early seventies are haunted by Vietnam, and by a childhood seared with the live images of soldiers under fire. We all knew someone who had been wounded—or killed. And given the absurd politics that would not look for answers, we all figured we’d be there one day. In 1969, chances of being killed in Vietnam after your first thirty days were one in three. Imagine growing up, knowing you were heading for that.
scbwimithemitten.blogspot.com, “The Mitten: Writer Spotlight: Gary D. Schmidt”The personal thread
Holling is me, or I am HollingThe convergence of autobiographical details in the novel, the suburb, the tracking, the Wednesday afternoons, the black armbands, raised the obvious question: how much of Holling Hoodhood is Gary Schmidt? He answered it without qualification.
So, in many ways, yes—Holling is me, or I am Holling.
One detail about the finished manuscript sits outside Schmidt’s own experience entirely. His wife Anne, who died in 2013, shaped the book’s final moment. He has named her contribution specifically.
The last line of The Wednesday Wars is hers.
scbwimithemitten.blogspot.com, “The Mitten: Writer Spotlight: Gary D. Schmidt”Schmidt said this while describing Anne’s contributions to his work broadly, but the claim is precise: the sentence a reader carries out of the novel belongs to her.
What he wants us to sit with
Honest about the world, not a Hallmark cardSchmidt writes for middle schoolers because he thinks the years genuinely cost something, not because they make a convenient audience. He has described in detail why he finds the age range worth taking seriously.
It’s a time when a kiddo is beginning to leave childhood, and look at the intensity of that leavetaking: suddenly, the kiddo is thrown into a world filled with others who, like herself, are trying to understand who they are in every way we can imagine: socially, intellectually, politically, economically, religiously, aesthetically. The kiddo’s own body is acting bizarrely. And in all this, the middle-grade kid is taking on all sorts of new identities and perspectives as he grapples with new ideas, new social relationships, and the startling realization that she can have ideas and beliefs that are truly her own instead of those of parents and peers. It’s an intense time.
Intensity of subject matter alone is not enough for Schmidt. He has a specific complaint about fiction that puts a lesson ahead of a story, and he has described the antidote in concrete terms.
A good story always comes first. All readers—but especially young readers—are attuned to the story that is really a sermon in disguise: that book that is meant to change your behavior into something more along the lines of some current orthodoxy. So a good story first. And with that good story should come honesty about the world, which is not a place where things always end like a Hallmark card, which is not a place where people are one-dimensional, but which is a place where complex characters inhabit settings which are messy and broken.
Behind Schmidt’s insistence on honesty is a belief about what fiction is actually doing when it works. He has made this argument at its most elemental level, and it explains why he does not treat story and truth as separate pursuits.
A good story is always a true story. And truth is almost always conveyed best through story. It seems to me that they are very, very close... a strong story will always have a center that speaks to us because of a fundamental human truth which is being vividly realized before our eyes.
literaritea.blogspot.com, “LiterariTea: A Little Bit About Gary D. Schmidt”