Two Wolves
Two Wolves
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Tristan Bancks on Two Wolves
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A news story, then a dare to himselfThe book began with a real-world event, not a fictional premise. Bancks was watching television news coverage of children who had been taken on the run by parents who had broken the law, and the image lodged.
I first jotted the idea for Two Wolves after watching news stories about kids who had actually been taken on the run by their criminal parents and I tried to make the story feel as real as I possibly could.
Committing to the idea required a separate decision, one born from the commercial disappointment of his earlier work. Before Two Wolves, Bancks had been writing lighter, funnier books that were not finding the audience he had hoped for. That failure gave him a kind of permission.
If the books are only selling a few thousand copies, I might as well write what I really want to write. There’s probably something in that.
He went into the project without certainty it would work, writing toward a darker and more literary register than anything he had attempted before. The books he had read as a boy in the Blue Mountains, survival novels about children alone in the wilderness, were the emotional territory he was trying to reclaim.
I thought, ‘I’m just going to write it anyway and see what happens.’ And it ended up being the best thing I had written up to that point.
That judgment was eventually confirmed by readers: the book reached 100,000 copies sold in Australia and New Zealand, a milestone that opened the door for the kind of fiction he had always wanted to write.
How he wrote it
A vision board, survival novels, and a title found in year fourBancks builds stories the way a director storyboards a film, assembling images before sentences. For Two Wolves he photographed a real cabin he found in the Blue Mountains bush, which became the physical model for the hiding place where protagonist Ben Silver and his sister Olive end up. The survival novels he had loved as a boy, including Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet and Jean Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain, went back on his reading pile specifically to inform those sequences.
I think even though you wouldn’t read Two Wolves and immediately know it was a child of those two stories, if you read it with that in mind, you could see it.
His process runs against the conventional advice to outline first. For Two Wolves, the first proper structural outline arrived around the third draft, after he already knew what the story wanted to be.
I write first, outline later, then write another draft. It’s a messier, juicier way to write for me, rather than outlining up-front.
Ben Silver’s hobby, stop-motion filmmaking, was not decoration. Bancks had a filmmaking background himself, having trained as an actor and directed short films before turning to books full-time. That shared detail was the practical hinge that let him write a suburban kid placed in a situation with no real precedent.
Ben Silver in Two Wolves, is on the run with his parents who have committed a crime, a highly unusual situation, so making Ben a filmmaker gave me a ‘way in’ to him and allowed me to write him as honestly as I could.
The element that would eventually give the book its name and its central moral question arrived only after four years of drafting. Bancks discovered the parable of the two wolves, an old story in which a grandfather tells his grandson that two wolves fight inside every person, one carrying kindness and truth, one carrying greed and pride, with the winner determined by which one is fed. He had been writing about that tension the whole time without having a name for it.
I was at about the fifth draft stage when I found this allegory, and it just captured so much of what Ben was about. It was really late in the process. I was probably working on the book for four years before I finally had that title.
What he wants us to sit with
The wolf you choose to feedThe moral weight of the book is calibrated to a specific developmental moment. Bancks is writing for readers at the age when external authority stops supplying all the answers. Ben Silver is being asked to protect parents who have broken the law, with no adult in reach who can tell him what the right thing is.
When you get to 11, 12 years of age, you start to think for yourself and make your own choices. Before then, your parents tell you what is right and wrong.
The lesson Bancks takes from the book’s own genesis, writing something he genuinely cared about rather than something he calculated would sell, is the same invitation he extends to readers navigating the dilemma inside the story. What you choose to sustain will determine what you become.
The key is really creating the thing that you love, and then interesting things happen as a result. Worst case scenario, you end up with a thing that you love, even if nobody else quite understands it. And if it does work out well, you have a book that sells 100,000 copies and opens the door for you to write more stories like that.