Local students gave author Gordon Korman a big welcome when he visited Reed Intermediate School and Newtown Middle School (NMS) on Friday, May 8.

Described by school staff as a "literal legend" in the world of books, Korman has published over 100 titles, sold more than 35 million copies, and seen his stories translated into 32 different languages. Some of Korman's books include Restart, the Swindle series, the Ungifted trilogy, his contributions to the 39 Clues series, and much more.

Korman's visit to the middle school was a full circle moment for him, as his professional career began exactly where many students are now: he was only 13 and in middle school when he published his first book.

It is this unconventional start to his career that is one of the reasons why he gets picked for assemblies and author visits, according to Korman.

He said it was by complete accident. In the 1970s, when Korman was in middle school, the track and field coach had to teach English. This was less of a mistake so much as it was a scheduling glitch, but either way, he was the only adult who was available to cover Korman's English language arts class.

Having never taught English before, the coach had no idea what assignment to give his students. He drew a blank and told everyone to work on whatever they wanted for the rest of the year. Since it was February, Korman spent every class period for the next four months working on a story.

Korman even started bringing it home and working on it at night.

"I just had a ton of time," Korman explained. "So that's how I wrote my first draft of my first book, This Can't Be Happening at Macdonald Hall."

Since people did not have computers or iPads back then, Korman said he wrote the entire book in cursive in an old composition notebook. Korman laughed as he said he got a B+; he actually received an A+ on the story, but they deducted one grade due to messiness.

He was the class monitor for Scholastic book orders. People could not order online, so a kid would gather order forms, collect the money, and send it out by snail mail. Korman felt brave and mailed his first book to the address on the Scholastic book order sheets.

It was history from there.

"It still took over a year for the book to come out, it was all pretty slow. But there I was, I was 14, a freshman in high school and I had my first book out," Korman said.

He just turned 62 last fall, which means he has been writing kids books for over three quarters of his life.

Having just released his 107th book, Hypergifted, earlier this year, Korman said people tell him that he must be the fastest writer ever. He clarified this not the case; the reason he has written so many books is because he got this "kind of crazy, early, and, let's face it, lucky head start."

He went over the ideas and creative process across some of his books, and how many of his ideas pull from real life.

For the Ungifted series, Korman said he was inspired by a local high school's robotics team, which designs and builds robots for competitions. This spurred him to think of a story where a regular, average kid got sent to his school district's super genius, gifted academy by mistake.

His book Slacker comes from his oldest son. Korman said his son is not a slacker, but was a huge gamer.

"Research can come from books, the internet, libraries, and so on, but it can also come from just being an observer, by keeping your eyes and ears open," Korman explained.

A lot of Korman's books take place in schools, so when he visits schools like Reed or NMS, he said he can do research just by looking around. He will pay attention to everything, from a school's auditorium layout to its teachers.

In that sense, Korman said, "anyone I meet here today could be research for a character."

He continued, "And it probably wouldn't go like, you tell me your life story and I write a book about it. It would be more the little things you pick up, how you dress, how you act, how you talk."

Even something as simple as how a person says hello, whether it is "yo" or "what's up," can add to a character. Korman said there was a kid in his high school who never once used the word "hello." Instead, he always used to say "greetings."

"None of you guys know my friend. But don't you have a feeling in the back of your mind for just the kind of doofus we're talking about because of one word," Korman laughed. "So if you can get that much personality out of one word of dialogue, think of how much you can get out of ... everything."

He also went over other topics, such as the differences in his book titles across languages and more personal, sometimes even silly, anecdotes.

Each of his presentations ended with a Q&A segment, where students were free to ask Korman questions.

Reporter Jenna Visca can be reached at jenna@thebee.com.