Part of the impetus for the novel is that Caleb is someone who wants to be special. He knows that he doesn’t want to be ordinary, and his dad is very proud of being ordinary, his dad loves ordinary this, ‘Well, ordinary people just want, you know, this, ordinary people just want that,’ when he was talking to the TV. Right? Like talking back to the news like you do. And Caleb in his mind says, I don’t want to be ordinary, and Caleb’s dad says you’re not ordinary, you’re ‘extra-ordinary.’
And he knows that his father’s paying him a compliment, but because he knows how much his father loves being ordinary, he thinks that Caleb thinks that his father is telling him you are the most ordinary, the most boring, the most uninteresting and unspecial person in the whole universe and that’s great. Like that’s what he thinks his father’s saying. So that lights a fire in him where he says I’m going to be different, I’m going to be special, and that sort of sets off the whole adventure, because he starts trying to find ways to make himself stand out.
But that misunderstanding, that idea of being told you’re special, and, of course, his father, we know the actual meaning of extraordinary is special, different. Right? You are extraordinary! But I am finding that when I visit classrooms and I ask, well, what does it mean, that at least 50 percent of the time the kid that raises their hand and I call on first thinks that it actually means the most ordinary, like extra-ordinary.
Like this is not an uncommon misconception. You know, my editor and I have gone back and forth on well, is it believable, you know, that a kid his age wouldn’t know that word, especially one who uses vocabulary the way that he uses vocabulary through my voice in the book, and I said, I think it’s really important, you know, there’s often just words we don’t understand. There’s often these gaps that happen for us where, you know, you’ve lived your whole life and then suddenly you’re 25 and you realize you’ve been mispronouncing a word for all this time.
You know, all of that feels very real to me when you’re young, especially when you’re very young. And so, I kind of loved, I found it charming that misunderstanding, you know, that he could imagine extraordinary means ‘extra ordinary.’ And to me that just fueled the whole novel and was a really fun place to start and end.
