Month: January 2014

Wooden Bones a Finalist for the Oregon Book Awards

Good news!  My book, Wooden Bones, is a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in the Children’s Book category.  It’s a pretty broad category, from picture books to middle grade novels.  My book is a short novel aimed at 9-12 year-olds, though I really wrote it for all ages.  Who doesn’t want to know what happens to Pinocchio after he became a real boy?  The winners in each category will be announced on March 17 at a ceremony in Portland.  I won an Oregon Book Award in 2011 for The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys and it was a terrific honor.  And whether I win this time or not, I appreciate the nod more than anything else.

So much of my life as a writer is spent in isolation, hunched over a keyboard in the wee hours of a morning, and it’s nice when every now and then you get a little external confirmation that all those hours of work haven’t been for naught.

From the Video Archives: Lee Child’s Writing Advice to Writers Is to Ignore All Advice

“The best advice for a budding writer is to ignore all advice.”

Child has a lot of words of wisdom (I won’t call it advice or you might ignore it) packed in that short two minutes, but that was the line  I agree with the most. I’ve certainly handed out my share of writing advice, but really, none of it amounts to much. You put one word in front of the other, and if you keep at it, and trust our own vision and your own voice, in the end you might have something good. And if not, it’s at least yours.

And while I’m a big believer in constantly trying to get better as a writer, I also think there are times when it’s best to stop taking writing workshops and stop reading how-to books and stop hanging out on writing-related forums and just do the work.  This isn’t to say you never take another writing workshop again; it’s just to say that there are periods along the way when it’s best to get all the other voices out of your head and just follow your own path.