Reading and Writing--Another form of Mentorship

Good readers make good writers--when they practice.  Award winning writers can become mentors for people looking to improve their craft in writing. Krashen makes some good points about strategies for reading and writing.

I began working with books for youth when I began teaching K-12 students.  I started focusing on authors for middle school students when I began teaching in middle schools in 2006.  To date I have probably read between 400 and 600 books, many by Newberry award winners.  My goal was to begin to get the feel for how the books "sound" and their "readability."

My goal is to begin to write some youth fiction soon.  In the course of reading all of these books, I have found some favorite authors and others whose books I enjoy less.  Rarely I have discontinued reading with I found the topic or how the book read incompatible with my personal preferences.

Recently I was working with Rick Riordan, author of the Percy Jackson books.  Rick Riordan was picked by Scholastic to be the first author in the Thirty-nine Clues series of books--Maze of Bones.  I listened to the six books in his series for adults involving Tres Navarre, private detective.  My goal was to explore the differences in the author's style when he changes from books for adults to books for youth.  There is a significant different in vocabulary, among other things.

I have some favorite authors and themes.  One of my Wikispaces websites focused on much of this youth reading. 

I need to begin practicing my writing skills in this genre.  Some of my favorite authors are Tamora Pierce (in the youth market) and Anne McCaffrey (her dragon series of books).  My mother and I both enjoy the "Cat Who" series by Lillian Jackson Braun.  I need to learn from each of these mentor-authors and to use their influence to create my own cast of characters and worlds.








Krashen, S.D.  (2003).  Free voluntary reading:  still a very good idea. In S.D. Krashen Explorations in Language Acquisition and Use  (pp. 15-29).  Portsmith, NH:  Heinemann.  Preview retrieved on March 21, 2009, from http://books.heinemann.com/shared/onlineresources/E00554/chapter2.pdf.