Caroline Bock's Blog: Caroline Anna Bock Writes - Posts Tagged "writing"

What Makes A Children's Book Great? was the theme of the May 31st conference on children's publishing I attended at Scholastic headquarters (in downtown Manhattan -557 Broadway. Note: the open-to-the-public bookstore is on the ground floor worth a visit for anyone with children in their lives!).

Did the four-hour conference answer the question? Not exactly. Perhaps there is no answer is the answer. Lots of thought-provoking things were said, and the energy in the packed auditorium with its bright Clifford-red seats was high, full of hope that someone will write another break-out, surprise us all, someday classic. Random quotes include:

"Young adult books are popular with adults because they hooks readers in quick. They tend to be more plot driven.... I'm still getting used to saying 'the last century'..." Pamela Paul, Children's Book Editor, New York Times Book Review

"It's still about authors writing stories they're passionate about..." David Levithan, Scholastic editor and young adult author

"The line is blurring between literature and entertainment...[in the digital age] writers are impatient..." Rosemary Stimola, literary agent, most notably of Suzanne Collins, author of the Hunger Games

"What makes a book great...the evidence not just of a brilliant mind but a glittering heart..." Beth Kephart, young adult author.Small Damages, Kephart's seventh young adult novel, will be released this summer. (I plan to read it: review copies were given out at conference!)

"If it lingers in my imagination, it's great..." Peter Brown, children's book author and illustrator.

What do you think makes a children's book great?

Truly, author of LIE
a critically acclaimed young adult novel -a must-read for your summer's list. more at www.carolinebock.com

Caroline Bock

Do you ever stop reading and start to write? I’ve been reading a lot of short story collections trying to stretch my own writing…it’s quicker to read short stories and the writing is sometimes more telling in short form than long.

More telling: Tom Perrotta talks about point of view is switched, interwoven through many of the short stories in the preface to the 2012 edition of The Best American Short Stories – and how this was radical 20 years ago and more going back— and isn’t anymore. Big check off for me because I like to switch point of views a lot in longer pieces (see LIE, my debut novel-10 points of view) but didn’t do it in the past, wasn’t it against some rule somewhere? But now I’ve tried it in some new pieces – and it doesn’t hurt at all.

Not new, uneven, but often exhilarating exploration of character: The Book of Other People edited by Zadie Smith. Outstanding stories include: “Gideon” by ZZ Packer, heart-breaking, about a black-white romance, and the hilarious stream-of-conscious ranting of Jewish grandmother to her grandson in “Rhoda” by Jonathan Safran Foer to the story I can’t shake from me: “Puppy” by George Saunders with its two different points of views – two women at different ends of the economic divide and a disturbed boy chained to a tree and a puppy.

I’ll admit it. I can’t stop reading. I read to write. I am a hard-core reader.

Next story collection: Married Love, by Tess Hadley. What she says in the afterward resonated with this reader-writer: “I used to be nervous if I didn’t ‘know enough.’ Now I trust, up to a point, that the best part of “knowing” is imagining. If you can imagine it, then you’ll probably be able to write it.”

So here a few of my writing thoughts… notes… from reading these short story collections..,

1) the rule is there are no rules
2) we all want something new
3) even with no rules, wanting something new, we still want what we’ve always wanted: story, a way into other people’s lives because we can’t stand our own or a way into our lives to understand anything at all.
4) At the end of day it’s you knowing that you can trust yourself to
imagine and write.

More thoughts on reading-writing out there?
Caroline Bock

I just finished a new book about writing, GOOD PROSE: The Art of Nonfiction by Tracy Kidder and his editor Richard Todd. This is worth a read for new writers and more established ones. Some of its gems include a chapter on point of view in creative nonfiction as well as a chapter on “Being Edited and Editing.” The work ends with an insightful chapter on usage and grammar, which includes a warning against medical, political and digital age clichés including my own pet peeve—use of “mega” and “giga” and “nano” as prefixes.

The back and forth between the writer and the editor is what delighted this writer the most. We live inside our heads as writers and good editors help us take what’s inside out – freely, unwieldy at times, wildly at other times.

Why does this matter on the 4th of July? In too many places around the world, people are denied basic freedoms of expression – they cannot assembly, speak or write freely. In the United States of America, our Founding Fathers thought it critical to write down what we as Americans are guaranteed in exchange for our good citizenship, our allegiance. "... in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

We, the People, wrote our Constitution down and have been debating different aspects of it ever since—but the Constitution of the United States still stands 237 years later. And we need to remain vigilant about our freedoms, especially in an age of easy electronic surveillance. Today, on the 4th of July, we celebrate our freedom, and I write. Do you?

Truly, Caroline
www.carolinebock.com


Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction

Six random things you don’t know about me…

-I can’t stand coffee, the taste or the smell. (I drink lots of tea!).

-I’m afraid of Ferris wheels and apartments on high floors with lots of windows (that’s why I always lived in brownstones in Manhattan).

-The summer after I graduated high school, I biked from Hyannis to Provincetown and via ferry onto Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard with my brother Mark, still one of the best trips of my life.

-I hiked the High Peaks in the Adirondacks and climbed Mt. Marcy and Haystack among a dozen other mountains and had my first kiss in a pup tent with Howard from Brooklyn. I was fourteen and on a three-week backpacking trip with the American Youth Hostels.

-I miss my dad, who passed away last October, every day. He brought four kids on camping trips every summer. He made a great kugel. He gave us the world and all the love in it.

-In Mrs. Murano’s class third grade class at George M. Davis Elementary school in New Rochelle, I wrote my first poem, and I can recite it to this day: In the woods/where there are tall. towering trees/tiny. timid animals/rigid, rustling leaves/I stand there/just me.

And one thing I hope you do know... I have a new novel coming out in February! Look for BEFORE MY EYES from St. Martin's Press everywhere books and ebooks are sold!

....Caroline
more at www.carolinebock.com
Before My Eyes

My top ten for aspiring writers:

1) Write on a regular schedule.
2) Finish a first draft of what you write.
3) Re-write.
4) Share it with someone who reads a lot.
5) Re-write and look at plot closely
6) Re-write and look at characters closely
7) Re-read entire work, try reading parts out loud. Cats are very good listeners.
8) Finish. Say it's done. It's good enough. So many really good writers I've met in workshops, in the MFA program, never trust in themselves to say a work is finished.
9) Send it out into the world.
10) Breathe. Take a breath. Read, a lot. Take notes on what you read. Is there a word you discover? Is there a name? (I'm becoming a big collector of names). Be generous to other writers. Write a review. Try a different form, for example, write flash fiction if you write novels. Don't wait too long to return to #1...

What does your writing to-do list look like?

--Caroline

Before My Eyes

I’ve been reading a lot of work this past month by Elizabeth Strout, known most famously for her novel-in-stories Olive Kitteridge.
Olive Kitteridge

The three works I’ve read seem to blend into one book. In the last that I read, My Name Is Lucy Barton, her new novel, one of the characters, a writing teacher tells her, “We all only have one story to tell,” and she goes on to say that we tell it, in many different, over and over and that’s okay. I felt this way with her recent work. It was all one story.

I began this journey without a plan; picking up the O. Henry Prize Stories 2015 collection and discovering her short story, “Snow Blind.” A rural, small town. A tightly knit family, the Applebys, and a terrible family secret. One of the children, Annie, ultimately does leave the small town, almost miraculously, becomes a star of screen and stage, but even she cannot totally leave behind her small town family and her history. I found a link to the story here: http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/p...

I learned soon after reading this masterful short story that her novel, The Burgess Boys, was being made into a HBO mini-series, and realized I hadn’t read this book. It’s the story of two brothers, both lawyers, one more successful than the other in New York City. Along with their sister, who never left their small town in Maine, they harbor a deeply-held family secret. When the nephew does something stupid and terrible in the hometown, all breaks loose between the siblings. However, ultimately, (no spoilers here), the ties of the siblings to one another and to their history in that Maine village bind them to one another more than to anyone or anything else.
The Burgess Boys

I then thought: I must read her new novel. In My Name Is Lucy Barton, the main character, nicknamed ‘Wizzle’ by her mother is very ill. She’s in a New York City Hospital (what I take to be Cornell Presbyterian, though it’s never named. There is a view of the famously art deco Chrysler Building and having spent a lot of time there in recent years, I can imagine the view of the building, glistening, in my mind’s eye). Her mother on her first visit to New York City, and the first visit between them in years. Staying at her sick bed for several days, the mother tells story after story, of people from their Illinois farm town and their impoverished life together. In many ways, My Name is Lucy Barton is a story about how stories heal us.
My Name Is Lucy Barton

But at the end of my reading I thought: Can we never move far away enough to leave our family, our hometown, our dark family secrets, no matter how we try to re-make ourselves? The answer for the characters in these Strout stories is: no. We are bound to our family, our siblings, our towns. This is the essential story that gets told again and again in these works by Strout.

Have you ever spent time with an author and felt you knew their story?

....Caroline
P.S. another stories that binds: Before My Eyes