PINE BLUFF — St. Joseph High School classmates Timothy Lenox, Joey Richardson, Joshua Sanders and Alexandria Thomas were all characters in their own right before that fateful day in November when Sanders popped off in English class about the day’s lecture.
They were stunned when their teacher, Cliff Heyer, responded by assigning them a project of a different sort, albeit one that didn’t alleviate their workload. They would collectively write a novel, due in February.
“Josh was trying to get us out of work and we wound up working harder than we’ve ever worked in our life,” said Lenox, 17, shaking his head.
Collaborating seemed a tall order. The project would not replace their regular coursework and to make matters worse, the four weren’t particularly close, even though they comprised most of the school’s junior class body.
As Thomas, 18, put it, bluntly, “I was mad and I didn’t want to do it.”
Over the course of the next few months, however, they would learn to cooperate, depend upon each other and be depended upon to hold up their share of the workload as they negotiated the very unfamiliar waters of authoring and marketing their novel. “America: Land of the Free, Home of the Genetically Altered” (Infinity Publishing, 223 pp) was released April 26.
“It taught us patience, it taught us to trust each other and it taught us responsibility,” Sanders said of the experience. “I wouldn’t mind doing it again sometime.”
Heyer said his original syllabus for juniors in American Literature called for expository and research papers, but nothing like this. However, he was uniquely qualified to support the authors, having developed a firm grasp of self-publishing, a production system that allows new authors to market their work without going through a traditional publishing house. He also provided editing and harped constantly about deadlines.
That aside, the book entirely fell to the four juniors, who quickly became characters of a different sort. The science fiction tale follows four young high school students as they try to untangle a series of events whereby their families and hometown are eradicated and they’re hunted for the government’s purposes.
The work calls to mind shades of “X-Men” and “The Matrix,” but it’s the realistic main characters, culled from the lives of the Pine Bluff high school students, that give the work its spark. It’s not hard to see why — over the months the four became keenly observant of one another and they weren’t shy about writing what they saw, giving the characters undeniable authenticity.
“As we started to get toward the end, we began to argue more, and so did the characters,” said Richardson, 17. “There were a lot of times I was in the middle of two other people arguing and I wrote my character that way. Josh’s personality is just funny and so a lot of what he wrote was comical.”
“If we were fighting, Joey would wait and then step in with a snappy comment. That’s what his character does,” said Sanders, 17. “(Thomas) hits a lot, so in the book, the girl hits people when they argue.”
“I could see that development immediately,” said Alexandra Pritchett, principal and one of the few people who got an advance look at the work. “Just being around them every day, I could see what they were writing was a reflection of who they were becoming as a group.”
The four developed certain rituals, such as the “creativity board,” a whiteboard that contained free-range musings (usually Sanders’) concerning the classroom’s aroma on any given day — “dentist’s office” and “hot dog water” are but two examples.
Even with such inspiration, they sometimes didn’t get work done or writer’s block set in or a new twist meant having to revise earlier chapters. Wrapping it all up in a way that made sense proved especially problematic.
“We hit 40,000 words and I still said, ‘We’re not gonna make it,’” Lenox said. “We had two full days where this is all we did. Mr. Heyer even bought us pizza so we could eat lunch and keep working.”
Once completed, the authors went into marketing mode, creating a Facebook page and Twitter account to drum up interest in the book.
They’ve left the seeds for a sequel, but all admit with St. Joseph School’s closing scattering them to different communities to finish 12th grade, a second effort is unlikely. For that reason, the four dedicated the book to their teacher. That, and to make up for vaporizing him in one of the early chapters.
“Mr. Heyer stayed on us all the time, that’s all we heard about,” Thomas said. “But it was worth it.”
The book contains violence, but gore is muted and the language is similarly tame enough for readers seventh-grade to adult. To learn more, visit the book’s Facebook page.
