Authors draw from their own experience with life, be it things they’ve lived through, witnessed, or heard of. Surrounded by high school students, one English teacher put his observations from time in the classroom into print.

After getting second place in an international short story contest in 2015, Matt Flickinger won a prize package that gave him the opportunity to publish a novel. Currently available as a Kindle Exclusive only, “These Dreams Which Cannot Last” will be released as an ebook on iBooks and other venues in the next year.

“It’s a young adult, coming of age story, kind of a dual-narrative,” Flickinger said. “It follows the year in the life of a freshman high school boy and a junior high school girl, both of them struggling with some form of loss in their life and kind of finding solace with one another in terms of friendship and finding out a little bit more about themselves through the experiences that they share.”

Flickinger found inspiration for the  book from a number of different places.

“I really like reading young adult works, and a little bit of the experiences in the book are based on personal experiences, [but] it’s not at all an autobiography,” Flickinger said. “Basically, I wanted to write a relatable, modern, young adult work that gets at issues that freshman boys go through, kind of all freshman go through, and that touches on some identity issues with both characters that would be engaging to readers in a real way. It doesn’t really pull punches when it comes to the more conventional and less conventional topics in teenage life.”

Pulling from his daily experiences with high schoolers at his job, Flickinger aimed to make the book as realistic as possible.

“I think [being a teacher] just solidified some of the choices that I made in terms of character motivation, the way that they interact with one another, the world, their parents,” Flickinger said. “Teachers are always listening in I think, even when you guys don’t know that we are, which kind of made it easier to tell when I was being honest and real with the way that kids related to life and kids related to each other. I feel like I read a lot of young adult works in which authors are kind of guessing, and they come off as pandering or unrealistic and I didn’t want that. In terms of my teaching, I think it’s just what I’ve learned from my students to create an accurate and real voice for the age that I’m writing about.”

Flickinger doesn’t think he’ll ever feel completely finished working on a piece of writing, as there are always potential edits to be made. However, for the time he spent writing the book, he feels satisfied with the way it turned out. So far, no one has had anything bad to say about the novel, he said.

“I’ve had a couple of students come in this year, one of them left me a review the other day on Amazon,” Flickinger said. “Right now, the feedback has all been pretty overwhelmingly positive, but I also don’t think the kids who don’t like me are going to read my book. I hope they do, I mean hopefully everyone reads it, but so far it’s all kind of my fans who have read my book, and they loved it.”

Senior Meghan Henry had Flickinger her freshman and junior year, and she credits him with inspiring her to keep writing. Flickinger informed some of his students about the novel while he was writing it, and as soon as she found out the novel was published, she bought it and began reading it immediately.

“The book is about this kid who is coming into high school, he runs cross country, and he’s kind of finding his way,” Henry said. “He doesn’t really have any friends, and his one friend from middle school has found his own group in high school, which is pretty typical of the high school experience, I think. Everybody kind of finds new people and finds new interests, so it’s a relatable entrance into the book and introduction to Zain, the main character’s name.”

Another former student of Flickinger’s, senior   Megan Oldham, enjoyed reading the novel as well. Oldham said that she related to pieces in a lot of different characters and read several events throughout the book that she had been in herself or could see herself doing.

“It took me on a roller coaster ride of emotions, and it was definitely not a happy-go-lucky book where you just feel really good about it the whole time,” Oldham said. “It was one of those where you read it and you felt so emotionally connected and attached to the characters that any time they would experience something painful it would make me really sad for them and any time they’d experience something happy it would make me happy for them. I was just on a roller coaster of emotions, but ultimately I felt very satisfied after reading it.”

Oldham found reading a book written by someone she knew to be an interesting, worthwhile experience.

“I really enjoyed the book,” Oldham said. “It was especially cool just knowing that he wrote it, and reading it you hear it in his voice, in Mr. Flick’s voice, which was really cool because I saw a lot of the inspiration from Austin and Bowie High School in his novel as well, so I felt even more connected to it.”

Writing the book took Flickinger seven months. He dedicated many hours to writing the book and sometimes spent as many as 30 hours writing in a single week. The deal Flickinger won required a complete manuscript that needed little to no editing from the company, so prior to sending it in he spent a lot of time rewriting personal edits, finding support in those around him as he did so.

“My family’s very supportive, last year was kind of hard for us because I was gone a lot writing, and I find it difficult to write when there are a lot of distractions, the wrong kind of distractions, around,” Flickinger said. “I have a writing group that I used to be a part of that actually consisted of some teachers from the school as well as some outside people, it was definitely helpful. In the process up to that, the actual writing of the book itself was a very lonely experience though. The support that I got was just encouragement when I felt discouraged or got a reminder from the publishing company that I had a deadline coming up.”

Flickinger currently has  a young adult murder mystery in the works, and over the years he has also published various short stories, poetry, and a play.

“One thing that I have listed on my author pages is that in writing the blurb for this one and trying to figure out how it fits in with the rest of my works is that all of my works tend to gravitate around characters trying to figure something out,” Flickinger said. “Whether that is something about themselves, usually, or something about the world that they may or may not be aware of that needs figuring out, there’s always an introspective part to my works that is kind of a common thread. This one more so, just because it’s longer than anything I’ve ever written.”

With Flickinger’s efforts to make the book as realistic as possible, he creates a story Oldham finds relatable, and she recommends giving it a read.

“I think it should be one that we read in English class, it’s so real that I feel that every high school student should have the chance to read something that isn’t scripted,” Oldham said. “It’s not flowery and sugar coated and candy coated, it’s real. Every high schooler should have the experience to read something so down to earth.”