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

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

If you have a friend who’s an author, be prepared:

She will expect you to read her new novel, even when you say you the last novel you read was last summer—that one about billionaire sex or vampires, though you don’t want to admit this to your friend, who has written a serious literary novel.

She will say that you don’t have to read it and really mean—she wants you to buy her novel.

She will confide that she prefers you buy it at an independent bookstore, and you will not know what she means. You haven’t been to a bookstore since you had to buy your mother a Mother’s Day present two years ago. Whatever you read appears on the screen you also play games on and sometimes answer a text or email or as a last resort: a phone call.

And then when you do buy this novel, because you are a very good friend, she will ask you, “Have you read it? And what you do think?” Since the last time you had to report on a novel was in college or high school, you will deflect her questions with, “how are the sales?” and she will shrug your question off and persist on wanting to know what you think about her novel.

And then when you tell you love it, especially the opening scene, she will ask you about the end. You will have to say you loved it too, even if you skipped to the end and read only the last line,(hint: this English major trick will save you much persistent questioning from the writer).

After being relieved for passing this test, your author friend will ask if you will write an online review, even though you haven’t written anything about a novel since high school or college, and barely write anything longer than a text these days.

You’ll start thinking that having this friend is way too much work,if you haven’t already.

But somehow, guiltily,since you were once an English or liberal arts major too, you will compliment her on the complexity of the story once again, thinking that this will get you out of actually writing anything.

So later, while staring at the screen, crafting the words for your review, you will wonder how anyone writes anything, how did your friend write an entire novel of words strung together into sentences baked into paragraphs, resulting in a story with living, breathing characters, which the parts you read were really pretty good, especially that twist, so unexpected, a fictional dream, you remember that phrase from somewhere, and maybe you’ll even finish her novel someday.

You will turn off your screen and sit there in the dark, thinking that if you could only think of a story, and write it down, you could be a writer too.


Caroline Bock is the author of the new young adult novel, BEFORE MY EYES (St. Martin’s Press, 2014). More about her work at www.carolinebock.com or be her friend—and be prepared:

My brother Mark creates art from heart pine lumber in his studio in Ballston Spa, New York. The studio was once a barn that once shoed horses and repaired buggies. There are nicks for blacksmith tools and for the horseshoes in planks and rafters. He paints his art, some of it furniture, some of it paintings, the colors of the earth— brushed browns, and reds and yellows, allies of the zinnias and sunflowers. Mark is a gentle giant of a guy with a beard going grey and retro glasses, reminiscent of the glasses our father wore all his life, and I wonder if he wears them because they are cool and hip, or because they remind him of our father, who was neither?

The wind stirs in through the open windows, and the studio is a mixed scent of green wood and dog or horse and wildflowers from his plantings out front— and bad eggs, the sulfur from the springs that feed this upstate New York town. The art is substantial— a fish, three-and-a -half feet long, a carved rooster, its tail flaring, weighing four or five times the weight of a living rooster; the smooth flesh-like wood of a horse painting over four or five hands high. I wait to hear the rooster crow or the horse rear back or the fish, let’s call it salmon, splash out of its river toward to the sun, returning to spawn in the riverbed were it was born. The light dapples in and plays with the art.

My brother and I are only together for a few days until we return to our own, lonelier lives. On Sunday night, we flick on an old movie in his loft above the studio. “How Green Was My Valley,” won the Oscar in 1941 famously beating out “Citizen Kane,” is on Turner Classic Movies. As we watch, we both agree: our father would have liked this John Ford movie about a Welsh family of coalminers, a workingman’s tribute— and then there’s the ending. He would have hated the ending. He liked movies in which the good guys win: the American beat the Nazis; the average guy overcomes odds to find love and happiness. I don’t want to ruin it, but the father in the move dies tragically in his son’s arms, close enough to what happened with Mark and my father that we can’t talk when it’s over that we sit there on his couch in the dark next to one another, the silence running through us.

Once, we spent long summer days at our games: kickball, ring-o-leavio, red light green light one-two-three, one-two-three. We were four latchkey children without keys, the house on Daisy Farms Drive left forever unlocked by our father since it was easier not to dole out a key to each of the four of us kids. Anyway, we were always racing inside and outside, shouting for one another—our father booming at us: What the hell are you doing? Do you think you live in a barn? Close the door— playing freeze tag or hide and seek on languid summer nights until it was dark, and we could no longer hide or seek —Get in the house! You want to get killed by a car playing in the street at this time of night? After another threat or two, we’d come running, shouting too. He’d scuff our heads, his form of love, which we will never forget. My father never understood how he got a son, an artist, and a daughter, a writer, but he always had the same advice for the four of us —the way you make your bed, is the way you’ll sleep in it—which we didn’t understand until we did.

Finding Inspiration… Writing Prompts…
-Is there one locale (like my brother’s studio) in which all your senses feel alive? Write about that place.
-Do you have a sibling that inspires you? Write a short scene with him or her as an adult… and then another with you as a child.

If you want to visit Ballston Spa, New York, it’s about five minutes from downtown Saratoga, just north of Albany, and has fascinating antique and craft shops, and yes, Mark Louis Studios.

(P.S. if you haven't read BEFORE MY EYES, consider reading it now)