I wrote full time from 1975 to 1983, starved out, and took a day job that continued for the next twenty-seven years. I became a teacher in a small middle school in central California. In 1988 and 1989 I began writing again, using that experience in the novel Symphony in a Minor Key (see yesterday’s post). This is Neil McCrae’s Halloween from that book.

“What is Frankenstein’s favorite food?” Lisa Cobb asked.

Neil looked up from his desk to see that she was in tutu, tights, and dancing shoes. She was taller than the average sixth grader with more maturity in her face but still flat chested, so she looked the part of a ballerina. For the last several weeks she had been coming in to spend the time before school in Neil’s room, but she rarely approached him. She just hung around with her friends Sabrina and Elanor.

Neil said, “I don’t know, what is Frankenstein’s favorite food?”

“Hallo-weenies.”

Neil grinned and she ran off, pleased with herself.

Not since May, when Neil had first come onto the campus, had it seemed so different from a high school.

Neil found that he did not miss the feigned world-weariness of his high school students at all. He missed their conversations, and he missed the sense of camaraderie that came of teaching near-adults, but they were too staid. In their own way, following their own values, high school kids were as puritanical as any Pilgrim that ever rode on the Mayflower. Peer pressure was like the rule of the church patriarchs, looking over every shoulder, examining every action by the yardstick of current fashion. Everything not required was prohibited.

These children were in a different kind of transition. Their teachers encouraged them toward maturity, and most of the time they conformed. But on Halloween, they were all seven years old.

When the bell rang, the students came in reluctantly, and Neil chose to overlook their tardiness. He also raised his voice and spoke over their conversations while taking roll, rather than try to quiet them. Then Neil sent Greg and Rosa to close the drapes and a hush of expectancy came upon the classroom.

The drapes let in only a little light, certainly not enough to read by. Neil opened his desk drawer and took out a pair of candles on matching brass candlesticks that he had borrowed from Pearl. He lit them. He moved them so that they threw his face into harsh relief and projected his shadow, huge and menacing, on the wall behind him. He opened another book and read:

True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?  The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute.  I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth.  I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?  Hearken!  and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

He read The Tell-Tale Heart through to its grisly conclusion, timing himself by the clock on the back wall so that he reached the denouncement when the narrator cried, “. . . tear up the planks! here, here — it is the beating of his hideous heart!”, just half a minute before the period ended. For those long seconds after he had finished, the classroom was tomb silent.

Then the bell rang.

Half the students leaped to their feet screaming, then broke into laughter, and went out for their break repeating juicy bits of the story to one another. Neil sat back with a feeling of satisfaction, mixed with amusement at his own self-indulgence.  There was a lot of theater in Neil McCrae, but he kept it on a tight leash. Once in a while, though! Just once in a while it felt good to cut loose.

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.