WONDER FAQs

I’ve had a very busy, very fruitful last couple of months visiting schools and bookstores  across the country. I wish I could go to every school that’s invited me, or even to Skype with them, but as many of you know, being an author is a relatively new thing for me. I have a day job, and I have two kids. A busy life precludes my being able to go on a real book tour, and makes answering each and every email I get an impossible endeavor (though I try). But in the school visits I have made, and in the emails I have answered, I do notice a commonality to some of the questions I get. The main one, which is what inspired me to write Wonder, I’ve told many times elsewhere. But below (in random order) are a bunch of other questions I get asked with some frequency, as well as my answers to them.  

 Why is Justin’s part written without uppercase letters and without proper punctuation?

I played trombone for seven years through middle school and high school. And I remember thinking back then, especially when I would get into the really low notes, that  notes on a musical staff looked a little like lowercase letters of the alphabet. I don’t play anything now but I can still read music, and I still think that way. Ascenders and descenders remind me of half note and quarter notes, depending on where they fall on the staff. The baseline of a letter is a bit like a ledger line. Certain serif faces even have strokes that call to mind that graceful little flag on top of the stem of a note. Maybe it’s because I’ve been a graphic designer for so many years, but I’m trained to see typefaces and fonts not just as communication devices, but as visual cues for other things. So when it came to writing from Justin’s point of view, because he’s a musician, someone who thinks in musical terms, it just seemed natural for me to use lowercase letters to represent his thoughts in a very visual way. He’s the kind of person who doesn’t talk a lot, because he’s naturally shy, but has a lot going on inside. The running monologue inside his head has no time for capital letters or punctuation: it’s like his thoughts are streaming inside his mind.

Why did you go into different points of view? Did you know you were going to do that all along?

I didn’t know I was going to go into multiple points of view at the beginning of the book. I thought I would stay with Auggie for the whole story. But then I started getting very curious about Via and what she was going through in her life, and I wanted to get behind the motivation behind Summer’s bravely sitting down with Auggie at lunchtime, or Jack’s betrayal, and I knew that to do that, to really explore Auggie’s complete story, I would have to leave his head for a while. Auggie’s a smart kid, and he notices a lot of things, but he doesn’t ever really know the full extent of the impact he has on people. And I didn’t want to make him one of the precocious kids who somehow knows things he isn’t supposed to know: I find those types of characters largely unbelievable, and I wanted Auggie to always be believable to me.

So I decided to go into multiple perspectives. One of my all-time favorite books, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, does this, and that book has always stayed with me. Of course it’s risky to go into different perspectives because a) I’m know I’m no William Faulkner, and b) it’s easy for the story to become unwieldy and get away from you. Characters can sometimes hijack a story. It can be hard to get all the players to feel like they’re part of the same world.

When I made up my mind to go into multiple points of view, I decided to lay down three ground rules for myself. One: all the characters would have to propel the narrative forward in a linear way. While there could be some flashbacks, the plot would move forward with each point of view. It was like a relay race, and each character gets the baton and passes it forward. The baton is the story. Two: all the characters would have to enhance Auggie’s storyline. That is to say, they could tell their own story—but only as it intersects or weaves in and out of Auggie’s story. Three: all the characters whose voices we hear have grown or changed from knowing Auggie. As they get to know him, they all enhance his storyline as he enhances theirs.

Why doesn’t Julian have his own chapter?

 Julian’s major problem is that he never bothers to get to know Auggie, much less be changed or moved by him. As a result, he has nothing to add to Auggie’s story. He is too self-involved to be interested in Auggie, too consumed by what he thinks other kids are thinking about him. So Julian’s story could never enhance Auggie’s storyline the way, say, a relatively minor character like Justin’s does. Justin’s in the book because his romance with Via happens to intersect with Auggie’s story at a very pivotal moment in time, a moment that occurs within the timeframe covered in the book. In that brief time, Justin is transformed because of Auggie, and his actions, however minor, propels the narrative. Julian never undergoes a change. He stays the same throughout the year: an obstacle Auggie and his friends must get around—through his choice and his actions.

Now, I could have cheated a bit. I could have had Julian have some kind of revelation about Auggie, or even become interested in him enough to somehow impact on Auggie’s story. Then I could have included him in the book. But ultimately, that didn’t seem true to his character for me. Wonder is a character-driven book, and the most important thing for me was to stay true to those characters, their motivations and impulses. To have Julian suddenly shift course and start actually relating to Auggie, well, it would have been nice, but it just didn’t seem real. So for me to include a chapter from Julian’s perspective while staying true to his character would have meant writing a chapter full of the very mean things he said or thought about Auggie. But here I felt a certain responsibility as an author—you can even call it a maternal instinct—to those readers of the book who have craniofacial abnormalities similar to Auggie’s. I couldn’t in good conscious write anything that might hurt them in any way. I just couldn’t give voice to Julian’s ugly sentiments—in essence, to give a bully a platform. To what end? So he could try and rationalize his dislike of Auggie? So he could explain his point of view? I didn’t want to rationalize those mean impulses in him. I don’t believe there is a rationale for them. There might be a reason, and a cause, but that would be another book. I wasn’t about to let Julian hijack Auggie’s story and turn it into his own. The book’s not about him and how he became the mean-spirited kid he is. It’s about Auggie, the boy he never bothers to get to know. As a result, Julian’s voice has no place in the book.

This book has a strong anti-bullying message. Were you bullied as a child?

 Yes, it does have a strong anti-bullying message, and no, I wasn’t bullied as a child. But I remember a lot about that time in my life, and I know that bullying takes many forms besides the more obvious physical kinds that occur. There’s social isolation. There’s ridicule. There’s abandonment of friends. Those kinds of things I did experience, although never on the level Auggie does, of course. I remember kids like Julian. They feel emboldened and empowered by putting someone else down. It’s the classic bullying modus operandi: find someone in every crowd that can be at the bottom of the pecking order. That’s what Auggie was to Julian—someone to be at the bottom of the food chain. When it’s wasn’t Auggie, it was Jack by association to Auggie. And if it weren’t Auggie or Jack, it would have been someone else: maybe the two Maxes because they like role-playing games, or Reid because he’s an earnest kid who wants to save the oceans. But it would have had to be somebody. The Julians of the world always need somebody to put down to feel elevated themselves. It’s a very primitive feeling, about as emotionally immature as a person can be. Summer is on the opposite end of that spectrum: she’s quite advanced, emotionally and spiritually.

What character do you like the most?

 That’s like asking a mom who her favorite child is. I can’t answer that: I love them all.

What character do you identify with the most or is the most like you?

 I wish I could say I was most like Summer, but that wouldn’t be true. I try to be more like her every day, though. The character most like me is Isabel, the mom. Via’s a lot like I was when I was fifteen, though. Then again, I think Via and Isabel are a lot alike. But the character I identify the most with as a girl, or who represents what I might have been like if a kid like Auggie came to my school, is Charlotte. I think a lot of kids can relate to Charlotte. She’s nice enough, but she never really goes out of her way to be kind to Auggie. She’ll wave hello from a distance, but she never sits down with him. She helps Jack behind the scenes, but she never openly sides with him. She’s a good girl, but she’s not quite brave enough to act on her good instincts. That kind of bravery sometimes doesn’t come until you’re older, and sometimes doesn’t come at all. She represents the difference between simply being nice, and choosing to be kind, which is a main theme of the book. She’s the classic bystander, though I think by the end of the book she’s become aware of this. Her precept shows this. I think in the sixth grade, she’ll be an upstander, not a bystander.

Why don’t the mom or dad ever have their own chapters in Wonder?

 I purposely left out the parents’ point of views because it would have changed the focus of the book from child-driven to something else, something darker and somewhat more cynical. This is something I didn’t want. It was my choice to end the book on a happy note in Auggie’s life, a time when he feels triumphant and well-loved. But we know that life won’t always be so kind to him, and the adults in the book know that, too. It’s one of the reasons I think adults reading the book get so emotional when reading it—far more emotional than children. But life comes one day at a time, and it’s the prerogative of an author to tell whatever story they choose to tell, and to end it where they want. Isabel and Nate have their own story to tell, but I didn’t want to include it here. They are only seen through the eyes of children in the book, and are thus somewhat idealized by them. The children only see in their parents what their parents let them see—less so in Nate but very much so in Isabel. She’s very guarded about what she lets her kids see of her. She doesn’t want Auggie to see the fear in her eyes as she lets him—in fact pushes him—to go to school for the first time. She doesn’t let Auggie see how hurt and angry she gets by the faces others make when they see her son, or the mean things she overhears them saying. She only lets him see the side of her that will help him be strong and happy, but the other side of her, the one that’s afraid for her son, of what the future holds for him, is only seen by her husband and her closest friends. So the Isabel we see in the book is purely through the eyes of her children. We can imagine that she might be a very different person if we met her for dinner after a couple of margaritas: she would be more candid, more angry, more sad, more tired than she ever appears in the eyes of her children. I certainly never knew all the stuff my mother was going through at the more difficult times in her life, or what she was feeling. She shielded me from things, from her own feelings about things. Isabel does the same with her kids.

Will there be a sequel to Wonder?

 I’m flattered that so many kids ask me this, and offer me their beautiful and brilliant suggestions for what Auggie could be doing in the sixth grade, and in high school, and as an adult. And I’m sure my publisher would love a sequel ;) But I don’t think this is the kind of book that warrants a sequel. Some books are like that. I chose to end the book on a happy note in Auggie’s life, and I hope and pray for his well-being and happiness forever. Like his mom in the book, I have to believe that the world will be kind to Auggie and those like him. I have to believe that people will open their hearts to him. And maybe reading the book makes people think about the possibility of this happening. I wanted to tell Auggie’s story to make readers wonder about who they are and who they can choose to be. My hope is that after reading the book, they will always choose to be kind. 

There are more questions, but this is it for now. I’ll start posting more when I have a bit more time. Like I said: it’s been a really busy last couple of months. Start of school, full-time job, one-pot fudge brownies, Hurricane Sandy, birthdays, aging father, and one dog with irritable bowel syndrome (not pretty). I wish being an author were my one and only job, but for now it’s not. So again, my apologies for any emails not answered or tweets not retweeted. 

Until later,

RP