A fast track writing project has turned 12 college students into published authors in less than a week.

The project started when White Water Writers' psychology project, which gives aspiring authors a chance to publish their own novel in five days, was invited to Barking and Dagenham College.

The students involved were given the task to discuss possible plots for two books, coming up with the settings, characters and working out a timeline of events. 

They allocated themselves to a particular character and to write all the parts of the book in which that character appeared. 

Proof-reading began by the fifth day, with front cover designs, book formatting and dealing with corrections before the finished works were submitted for publishing.

“I didn’t actually think I could do this,” 17-year-old healthcare student Emmanuella Frempong, from Dagenham, admitted. “But here I am — I’ll be a published author.”

The first book called The Yellowstone Disappearances is a fantasy about unbreakable family bonds in Native American mythology, where two boys journey to Yellowstone Forest to grieve their father but have no idea about what is coming their way. It is a journey of deceit, desperation and discovery. 

The other book is a thriller, Our Lies Will Kill Us, about a man who spirals downwards after news about his sister’s illness when he tries in desperation to blackmail an old acquaintance to pay for her treatments.

E-sports student Shane Kirk, 17, from Hornchurch, said: “We all had our own ideas about what we’d like to see. It was interesting to see these perspectives and how we could make them fit together.”

The project was just as rewarding for their tutor Mark Hyde, head of department for learning and assessment at the college.

He said: “The moment when their books were complete and White Water Writing hit the publish button was one of the best moments of my 11 years in education.”

The students went from a blank page on Monday morning to watching the button click on their final print ready manuscripts by the end of the week.

The books are available on Amazon: The Yellowstone Disappearances is coded TM 9798329091014, Our Lies Will Kill Us is TM 9798329091922.