This year Jay Wamsted fulfilled a dream shared by many teachers – he finished and published a YA novel. Summer is a great time to start that novel of your own. Here’s some encouragement!
By Jay Wamsted
I tried for years to write a nonfiction book about my two decades in teaching.
I had a Ph.D., after all, and had managed to publish a handful of essays and articles. Readers enjoyed my stories; I was pleased that they seemed able to glean something from my experience.
People kept telling me that I should write a book. And yet, every time I attempted to put the pieces together, I got stuck.
That is, until I decided to make the book a piece of fiction.
I was roaming around my house one weekend when an image popped into my head. A girl, high school age, reaching out her hand. “Are you in or are you out?” she asked. I wasn’t sure exactly what she was talking about, but I couldn’t get the line out of my mind. It made no sense to my nonfiction self – this scene had never happened, so how could I write it?
Then I imagined her crouching in the ceiling of a school building, and the story started to make sense.
I visualized a school in the not-so-distant future, a building bent by politics and economics into a place consumed by control. In my future, public schools have been hollowed out so completely that they are forced to merge with the juvenile justice system; to save money, this society has combined schools and prisons.
If families can afford it, they send their kids to private school. If not, they ship their children off to this strangest of boarding schools, a place where students from all walks of life live together under one roof, navigating the terms of an uneasy alliance. Armed guards patrol the halls; ever-present AI monitors their every move with cameras and microphones.
In my draft, I wrote of a dystopian future, but one that felt near enough for me to write my thoughts upon it. I have been teaching public school for twenty years now. I have many thoughts.
I set some goals for myself
Following the adage of “words first, edits later,” I made myself write a couple hundred words a day, whether I felt inspired or not. Some days it felt amazing, time borrowed in the last minutes of planning or after school that I wouldn’t trade for the world.
Other days were a grind, and I would go back on the weekend to edit what felt like a train wreck. And yet, the words piled up – slowly at first, but with increasing rapidity as the weeks wore on. Soon I looked up and it was summer: a long breath to get the book in order.
At first my narrator and his friends only watch the girl I had come to know as the lockdown artist. But soon they found themselves caught up in a power struggle – good and evil battling it out for the future of this oppressive building. All the while, education continued apace in the lives of these trapped teenagers. They wrote papers, held class discussions, played sports. I loved writing both aspects of their school day.
There is a mystery, of course, a plot that drives us into the arms of the image that started it all for me: “Are you in or are you out?” Part of the joy of writing for me was discovering that mystery along with my characters. I would go on a run and a song would unlock some plot point, provide a revelation I didn’t plan and wasn’t expecting.
I would marvel at what was happening in the book; there were moments I felt as much reader as writer. I was spending all my free time on this lark, but there was no chance of me giving up at this point. I had to find out what happened.
Are you in or are you out?
My heroine says this to another character, but she might as well be talking to me. I finished the book and began looking for an agent, approaching small publishing houses. It was a whole extra layer of work attached to the project – one I enjoyed decidedly less than the writing.
After a couple of near-successes I gave up on the traditional route and began looking into self-publishing. I was lucky – I had one friend who wanted to do layout and design for the book and another who knew how to market it. Suddenly, the thought that I could get my characters and their story into the hands of other people didn’t seem so far afield.
I may write that nonfiction book someday. Increasingly, though, I’ve found some freedom in this fictional world I’ve created. Watching the characters struggle in their impossible situation, seeing them fight back against the system that tries to control them, I’ve been inspired.
I know these young people are not strictly “real,” as far as that goes. But they remind me so much of the thousands of teenagers I have known over the years. Any teacher will tell you – the students are the best part of the job. My characters may not actually exist, but they sure feel like real people.
Making a difference in the world is never simple – this goes for the characters in my book as well as for me. There are easier jobs I could find, but, I am convinced, none so rewarding, important, and, to be sure, fun.
I think I’m going to have to write a second book, stay in the world of The Lockdown Artist just a little bit longer. Teaching may be a grind, doubly so when you’re working on a side project. The children we teach, however, can be so inspiring. I’m grateful to my characters for giving me fresh eyes to see the world in front of me.
Do you have the novel itch?
My teaching career isn’t all that unique. The lessons I’ve learned over the years, the stories that inform my book – they’re of the same stuff that makes up every teacher’s classroom. We’re all out there, every day, playing a supporting role in a complex, wide-ranging plot involving dozens of more important characters. I bet most teachers have a book inside them, somewhere. More of us should follow that dream and write it out.
Are you in or are you out?
I’m in. What about you?
Jay Wamsted is a math teacher outside of Atlanta, Georgia. He has taught both middle and high school and recently celebrated the completion of his 20th year in the classroom. His futuristic first novel The Lockdown Artist draws heavily on his public education career. Read the first chapter at his website jaywamsted.com.
Jay earned his PhD from Georgia State University in 2013. His nonfiction writing can be found at Harvard Educational Review, The Bitter Southerner, Edutopia and The Mathematics Teacher, among others. His 2017 TEDx Talk is titled “Eating the Elephant: Ending Racism & the Magic of Trust.” Jay and his wife live with their four children and one beagle, just a short walk from school.
