Welcome to Wolf School! An intro to my 2022 blog mission

• 24/01/2022
• Siobhan O'Brien Holmes
• no comments

After blogging at Writer and the Wolf for a couple of years, I’ve decided to change direction a little for 2022 and I’m really excited about it! Instead of focusing blog posts on how to write middle grade and YA, I’ll be talking about how to read middle grade and YA as a writer.

The number one piece of advice I can give any writer is to READ. Read a lot, read widely, read analytically, read thoughtfully, read your genre, read other genres, read children’s books, read teen books, read adult books, read fiction, read non-fiction, read novels, read short stories, read restaurant reviews, read book reviews, read the newspaper, read blogs.

Where do you start?

Okay, that’s a lot of reading. So where do you start? Well, I said my golden rule for any writer is to read, but my golden rule for middle grade and YA writers is to read recently published middle grade and YA books!

But don’t just read. Annotate, make notes, ask questions, make lists, compare, contrast, interrogate, discuss, wonder, criticise, dissect. You can learn so much from digging into every novel you read and asking whether it works, why it works, how it was put together, what choices the author made.

I hope the Wolf School blog will help you become a better writer by becoming a better reader (and, because I’m an enormous TV and film nerd, a better watcher, too).