After three years in the making, NASH senior Sawyer Wright recently published her book The Four Take on Fifth as the final step in earning her Girl Scout Gold Award. 

A devoted Scout since kindergarten, Wright had little doubt that she would pursue the award in high school.   

“I’ve known that I wanted to earn this award for quite a while because it’s the last step,” she said.

In a similar fashion, inspiration for her idea instantly struck. 

“I knew I wanted to write a book,” she said. “I like writing, I love reading, and book characters influenced me when I was younger. I wanted to create positive influences for younger girls.”

The majority of progress made on the project took course during summer breaks due to Wright’s packed schedule during the school year. She embarked on her journey the summer before the start of her sophomore year, though it began at a crawl.

“That first summer I didn’t do all that much because it takes months for ideas to be approved,” Wright said.

After receiving approval from the Girl Scout Council and nailing down her main idea for the plot, Wright began drafting during the summer vacation before her junior year. At this point, she shifted into high gear. She said, “I really started working on it I wrote the whole script for it, did storyboarding, and designed the characters.”

The catchy title derives from the careful layout of the book.

“The book is split into four chapters,” she said, “one for each girl, and the book progresses through their fifth-grade year.”

Wright thoughtfully organized the plot, planning the general premise of the story before diving into the writing.

“They each deal with a main challenge, but on the sidelines of those issues, there are underlying friendship problems,” she said.

Wright also kept a specific audience in mind while writing, and the book is primarily aimed towards girls in upper elementary school. She chose this demographic specifically after stumbling upon some troubling research that changed her perspective and informed her purpose for writing. 

“I found online that girls’ confidence these days is dropping,” she said, “so I wanted to address the root cause and provide them with a model of how to deal with challenging situations.”

In the novel, each character is faced with a challenge that they must overcome. Wright expressed her goal of uplifting young girls and providing them with strong role models. While writing, she drew inspiration from her own life experiences such as having childhood friends move away.

The project itself was not without its own obstacles, and Wright shared her struggle with accepting help from others. Originally, the book was supposed to be formatted as a graphic novel, but Wright realized early on in the process that this path wasn’t realistic for her skill set.

“I actually quit the whole project at the end of that summer because I realized I couldn’t illustrate on my own,” she said. “In a comic book style, it would have been hundreds of frames.”

She scrapped the idea of a graphic novel, and decided to format it as a traditional novel. However, she didn’t sacrifice the artistic side of her work. The book includes 25 drawings in total, with five distributed in each chapter.

Recognizing the need for assistance, she decided to recruit a three artists to create the illustrations. 

“I got Brooklyn Hollaway, Iris Hong, and Jessica Yi, and they were all in my art class junior year,” she said. “They are all in the National Art Honors Society and the Digital Art and Computer Visions Club, and I found them by asking around those organizations and telling people about my project.”

The book serves as a blueprint for young girls to handle difficult situations while passing on a lesson that Wright learned herself: it’s okay to accept help from others.

“I couldn’t do it all by myself and I thought I could because I’m that type of person,” she said. “In the end, I think the finished product turned out so much better with those three artists.”

The artistic process was equally elaborate as the writing portion of the project.

“[The illustrators] each read their character’s chapter beforehand to understand their character, and from there, they made their own art based on my sketches.”

In alignment with her creative vision, she hopes that the special touches sprinkled throughout the book are apparent to readers.

“I encouraged Brooklyn, Iris, and Jessica to embrace their individual styles, and I think in the book you can see it,” she said. “We did the illustrations over the past summer, and I self-published through Amazon afterwards.”

For Wright, the process of earning her Gold Award didn’t end at publication. She continued on to complete the outreach component of the project.

“The point of a Gold Award is to interact with your community,” she said. “At the end of the day, it is a community service project.”

In order to complete the other half of the award, she visited Marshall Elementary School and presented a simplified version of the writing process to the young students.

120 pages in length, the key takeaways from this endeavor are clear in Wright’s mind: “I learned mainly to push past obstacles, but another big lesson I took away was knowing when to let other people help you.”

The book is currently available at all the elementary schools, and Wright recently received some heart-warming news.

“I’ve been told that they have a waiting list for it at Marshall, which I’m touched by,” she said.

If you’d like to purchase the book from Amazon, click here.