Not every book is written to sell. Imagine a book about a year in the life of a person who just goes to work every day and does his best. No car chases, no drug lords, no shootouts, no steamy sex. Its chance of publication – pretty close to zero.

Nevertheless, some books have to be written.

1986-7 was my best year as a teacher. I had gotten through the rocky couple of years that every teacher experiences in the beginning, and I had a nearly perfect class of kids. The cute, the clever, the interested and interesting came in numbers well above average, and there were very few pain-in-the-pinfeathers turkeys.

I hadn’t written a novel since I started teaching because there had been no emotional energy left over. When summer came after that nearly perfect year, I was ready and I wanted to write about teaching.

I wanted to write honestly, so the first thing I had to face was the Big Lie of education fiction. The most unbelievable thing about Kotter and the Sweathogs was not the teacher’s complicity in their nonsense, but the fact that there were only fifteen students in the room. I was accustomed to teaching about 200 students a day – six periods of thirty to thirty-five students each.

The second barrier was that I had been teaching sixth grade. Education fiction always takes place in high school so the teacher and his students can have a semi-adult relationship. I didn’t want that. It wanted to write from my own experience, for practical reasons and because I find middle school children endlessly fascinating.

I also needed a hook and a theme, something to give unity and meaning to my protagonist’s efforts and provide a background against which his daily efforts could be measured.

There is a facet of teaching you probably haven’t thought about. Everyone is aware of teachers taking sexual advantage of their students, and rightly abhor it. However, not every accusation is honest; students do sometimes lie. I have no sympathy at all for offenders, but it remains true that every male teacher lives in fear of being falsely accused.

I decided to make my protagonist, Neil McCrae, a high school teacher who is falsely accused of sexual misconduct. He is acquitted, but parents do not believe the acquittal. He moves out of state and takes a job teaching sixth graders (made believable by details I won’t give here).

Neil’s personal rehabilitation makes half of the story; the other half is a complete and accurate picture of a year in the life of a sixth grade class.

From my real school, I ordered two full sets of the paperwork I normally use to run a class. One set was for fall, the other set was used to build a virtual school. I produced a calendar, complete with holidays, parent-teacher nights, school productions and all the things that would have been on a calendar for my actual school. I drew up a set of lesson plans for the year. I made a list of students, with thumbnail biographies. I drew a room plan, and a campus map.

I decided to make Neil an English teacher and give him two three-period blocks. That’s rare, but not unprecedented. It meant that he would have only about sixty-five students, which would be easier for him and me to manage. It gave him two groups to play off each other, and also portrayed, in reduced form, the boredom by repetition that plagues school teachers.

During my last year before retirement, I taught six identical science classes every day. No one is good enough to make that work in a novel.

I put Neil’s school at the north edge of Modesto, California, where an almond orchard existed in the real world, and only rewrote the rest of the area slightly. For example, an abandoned motel in the real world became migrant housing in the novel.

I did the setup work at the end of my school year. I spent most of the summer in Europe, then began writing in earnest, and continued through the 1988-9 school year, with the intention of finalizing and polishing Symphony in a Minor Key the following summer.

My conceit was to make every day in Neil’s world match my world. Every rainstorm in my world would also occur in Neil’s. That turned out tragically differently than I could have expected.

On January 17, 1989, in Stockton, Patrick Purdy opened fire on a school yard full of children, killing five and injuring thirty more. It was only thirty miles from Neil’s imaginary school, and fifty miles from my real one.

Symphony in a Minor Key was more than two thirds finished at the time of the tragedy, and I had to decide whether to abandon my plan to mirror reality. I didn’t; I went on with the plan. Neil’s world, like mine, skidded out of its normal path for a while. Neil was sharply reminded how precious his students were, and so were the rest of us.