Spotlight on Frances O'Roark Dowell

Frances O’Roark Dowell is the bestselling and critically acclaimed author of Dovey Coe, which won the Edgar Award and the William Allen White Award; Where I’d Like to Be; The Secret Language of Girls and its sequels The Kind of Friends We Used to Be and The Sound of Your Voice, Only Really Far Away; Chicken Boy; Shooting the Moon, which was awarded the Christopher Award; the Phineas L. MacGuire series; Falling In; The Second Life of Abigail Walker, which received three starred reviews; Anybody Shining; Ten Miles Past Normal; Trouble the Water; the Sam the Man series; The Class; How to Build a Story; and most recently, Hazard. She lives with her family in Durham, North Carolina. 

Q: The Class features twenty kids, with twenty points of view. Why did you choose to give an entire classroom a voice? How does it impact events in the book?

First, I thought it would be fun! I love digging deep into characters and figuring out their back stories—their family histories, what’s shaped them, what motivates them.

Another reason I wrote The Class was I thought it would be interesting to have a group of characters who you get know both through their own POV as well as that of their classmates. I wanted to explore the ways that people’s insides so often don’t match their outsides. We sometimes forget that other people have complex and complicated lives.

How does this approach impact events? Well, each character gets a chapter, and each character’s chapter has to make the plot move forward. Because of this, all the kids have a role in the story. Nobody is a passive player; everybody matters.

Q: Are there any characters in The Class that you particularly relate to or see yourself in? What do you remember most about sixth grade?

I have a lot in common with Ellie—we’re both army brats, for instance, and our dads were both JAG officers (army lawyers). She’s an observer and a note taker, as am I, and she’s interested in figuring people out. I make up stories for everyone in line with me at the grocery store. I suspect Ellie does the same.

I remember that sixth grade was a time when things started changing in weird and mysterious ways. Friendships shifted, bodies morphed, romantic interests developed, and we started having boy-girl parties where we played Spin the Bottle and Seven Minutes in Heaven. Judy Blume was huge in sixth grade; everyone was curious about sex and periods and the strange things happening to our bodies.

Q: Can you give us a sneak peek of some of the writing advice we’ll find in your next book, How to Build a Story…Or, the Big What If? Were you writing stories at that age?

Writing is so much easier when you accept that revising is a built-in part of a process—that in fact, writing is a process. No one gets a story exactly right in the first draft. And this is good news! You can explore! You can mess up! You can experiment! You have an almost limitless number of do-overs to make your story the best it can be.

I started a lot of stories in sixth grade that I never finished. A book like How to Build a Story would have come in handy!