A Novelist Among Us

The+inspiration+behind+the+title+

The inspiration behind the title

Sarah Beaudoin, Staff Writer

The students of Goffstown High School all know John Webb as the kind of person who will always lend a helping hand. Mr. Webb is the Student Assistant Program Coordinator at GHS, but you probably didn’t know he also writes novels as a hobby. Though Mr. Webb isn’t a published author, he is still very proud of The Human Race, a novel  Webb authored which lives in his Google Drive. This piece of fiction started as a dream, “a dream that the sun started to grow and was about to explode and in [the] dream [he] realized that ‘oh my gosh I think we only have like 6 months before the sun explodes.’” He then started to think, “what do I do, what do I do, it was so real that [he] was just thinking like, ‘uhh I don’t know how to handle this, how do I say goodbye to my family, how do I try to rescue humanity, how do I try and rescue my kids, so they can live.’”  Mr. Webb was inspired by that dream and grabbed a pad of paper and started writing. He started listing the characters, then made an outline of the chapters. “I just had fun with, kind of creating a teenager in a small town in Maine and how she and her classmates figured out a way to save humanity,” Mr. Webb explained.

It is no doubt that Mr. Webb has a knack for helping people, no matter the situation, and it shows in his work for the school and his writing. When asked when he knew he wanted to help people, he explained that the realization hit him in high school, and his biggest inspirations are the kids he works with daily, from them encouraging him in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) to him wanting to help them so they can be the best version of themselves.