Will Hobbs
Will Hobbs
Will Hobbs is the author of nineteen novels for upper elementary, middle school and young adult readers, as well as two picture book stories. Hobbs credits his sense of audience to his fourteen years of teaching reading and English in southwest Colorado. When he turned to writing, he set his stories mostly in wild places he knew from firsthand experience. Hobbs has said he wants to “take young people into the outdoors and engage their sense of wonder.” Bearstone, his...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth22 August 1947
CountryUnited States of America
Seven of my novels take place in the Southwest, in the Four Corners area which has been my home since 1973. I know these mountains, rivers, mesas and canyons well, so it's been natural for me to draw on my own personal experiences here.
I've been under the spell of the North ever since my childhood in Alaska. More and more, I've been returning to Alaska, and sometimes my adventures inspire a story.
Since I've been at George Washington the last five years, he's made the biggest progress in terms of maturity and development. He's a special guy. He came up big.
Our program is based on developing players. Our players have improved physically and in every area of the game since they've been here. We don't get the kind of players I could recruit at Connecticut, so we have to rely on developing them. We do as good a job as anybody in the country at developing players.
This has to rank up there with the No. 1 game since I've been coaching. For it to end in such a dramatic fashion, you couldn't ask for a better way to close it out for the seniors.
This has to rank as the number one game since I've been coaching. To end in such a dramatic fashion on these guys' Senior Day, you couldn't ask for a better way to close it out. They deserve full credit for it. They worked hard all game.
Pacing has become more important than ever, largely because of other media. I've always tried to start my stories out with a bang, something that will hook their attention.
I've been reading about Crazy Horse and Custer for a long, long time, and I thought that if I was going to write a story that took place in the Black Hills, I should find a way to include this history in it.
I was astounded to learn that Alaskan caves might be hiding secrets about the earliest people ever to enter the Americas. That's when I began to picture a story that would start with kayaking and lead into the caves.
I do have two wonderful awards from the Western Writers of America, one for 'Beardance' and the other for 'Far North.' The award is called the Spur, and the plaques really do have spurs on them!
For 'The Big Wander,' I probably had ten different outlines before I made myself start writing. I would sleep on each one, thinking it was wonderful, but I would always awake perceiving some flaw.
Researching and writing about the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-98 was one of the most exciting and involving projects I've undertaken.
My seventeen years of teaching inform my sense of audience in every line I write.
In a lot of cases, writers discover that the novel needs to begin later in the action than they'd first thought.