Fifth Grade
Worksheets
Betsy Byars: From Reader to Writer
Where do characters come from? The obvious answer is from the writer's mind. That is true. Sometimes the characters are based on people that the author has met. Sometimes the characters are real people. Betsy Byars' characters are a mixture of all of these.
When she was writing The 18th Emergency, she needed a character. The character was a bully. She wanted the character to be terrible with a terrible name. She came up with a name that sounded hard. She thought it was unique. She called the bully Marv Hammerman. A line from the book reads, "There had been one Hammerman, just as there had only been one Hitler."
After the book was published, Betsy received a phone call from the real Marv Hammerman. At first she thought someone was playing a joke on her. It was no joke. Marv Hammerman explained that he was a teacher. He was reading her book out loud to his class. He said his class was glad to know that there were two terrible Marv Hammermans.
Betsy Byars creates stories that people can relate to. She has been called an author of realistic fiction. Betsy was born on August 7, 1928. She was born in North Carolina. Her father was an engineer and a bookkeeper in a cotton mill. Her mother loved acting and music. She also had an older sister. Part of her childhood was spent in the country. Some of it was spent in the city.
Betsy did not set out to become a writer. She did not know what she wanted to be when she grew up. Her father wanted her to be a mathematician. When she went to college, she set out to become a mathematician. Some of the math classes gave her some trouble. She switched her major to English. She still was not sure she wanted to be a writer. If she was going to be a writer, she wanted to be a reporter that traveled to exciting places.
