Caroline Bock-BEFORE MY EYES
YOUNG ADULT NOVEL WRITING TIPS
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Posted on Wednesday, April 19, 2017 10:36 AM
Write, Write, the yowling of desire.
Do you have a six word memoir? Must be six words. Post it, here, there. |
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Posted on Friday, March 18, 2016 3:12 PM
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Posted on Wednesday, October 28, 2015 9:36 AM
 Write 5,000 words today and you can binge-watch the rest of the first season of
Mr. Robot.
Write 4,000 words today and you can go to Starbucks for a
chai tea latte, grande, and re-read what you wrote. Live the writer’s life.
Write 3,000 words today—write hard and fast and then off to
the yoga relaxation class where you will ultimately lie on a mat and do nothing.
Write 2,000 words today and turn off the computer, leave it
off for the rest of the day, free yourself from the shackles of social media
and typing like one possessed. Write 2,000 words and go get your nails done by the
girl from Vietnam who scowls at your hands, looking at them intensely,
wondering what she should do with them. The nails are bitten down to the skin, bleeding
at her touch. All you really want is for her to hold your hands in the folds of
her own cool bones.
Write 1,000 words today and you can read the rest of
Franzen’s PURITY. You don’t know if this is a reward or not, you think not.
Write 1,000 words and you can go back to library and find new books, ones that
you will enjoy reading.
Open your novel and write 500 words this morning, you can do
this. You will know you made an effort. You will be giving the world what?
Ideas? Words. More words. Maybe some will make sense, maybe none will. You
don’t know what else means anything to you anymore. So, you write. Make a deal
with yourself: 5,000. You can do it. 5,000 words.
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Caroline Bock: Posted on Thursday, October 01, 2015 8:53 AM
HOW NOT TO WRITE...
-Listen to that voice that pounds the back of your skull
with,“Not today. I can’t do it. I’ll start on Monday morning at 6 a.m., no, at
5 a.m.”
-Oversleep on Monday morning until 7 a.m. and decide it’s
way too late to start.
-Talk about what you are going to write. Tell it to your writer friends, your book club, to the guy in accounting, who admits that the last novel he read was in
freshman English.
-Decide what you need is another outline. Exhaust yourself scribing
on a long yellow legal pad every plot point you can imagine (Zombies! Ebola
pandemics! Martians!) into your historical novel set in mid-20
century Europe.Add this yellow legal pad to the pile beside your desk.
-Confirm to yourself that what you truly need is more
research. This gets you going. The World Wide Web—hours wrap like rubber
bands into a ball— and reams of notes printed out. But it’s not enough. You can
justify a trip. You are writing about Italy, you must seek out the wonders of
Rome, or at least visit a nearby pizza joint, or partake of a shot of espresso at
the coffee shop. All this inspires you to do more research.
-Focus on your computer or your printer or desk. The printer
is hacking out pages like an old man with phlegm. Shouldn’t you upgrade? Isn’t
your monitor too small? Isn’t it time to back up? Clean up history? Shouldn’t
you be working at one of those standing desks—wouldn’t jogging on a treadmill
attached to your desk improve your writing? A trip to the office supply store is
what’s required, and you set out, determined to conquer technology and write
more, better, faster— and get in shape.
-Do anything but write one sentence and then another until a
page is done, a scene or chapter is drafted. How to write that first sentence?
That’s another blog.
----------------------------------------------------------- Much response to this post, so I've added this addendum:
"Graham Greene realized early in his writing career that if he wrote just
500 words a day, he would have written several million words in just a
few decades. So he developed a routine of writing for exactly two hours
every day, and he was so strict about stopping after exactly two hours
that he often stopped writing in the middle of a sentence...." (from the Writer's Almanac). Great advice, and now, I have to stop writing... (only kidding, I am just getting started!) Caroline
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Caroline
Bock is the author of two critically acclaimed young adult novels: LIE
(St. Martin’s Press, 2011) and BEFORE MY EYES (St. Martin’s Press,
2014). Her short stories and poetry have been published or are forthcoming in Akashic Press, Gargoyle Magazine and its
Defying Gravity Anthology, Fiction Southeast, 100 Word Story, Ploughshares,Prometheus,Vestal Review, and Zero
Dark-Thirty. She is also a contributor to The Washington Independent Review of Books. She writes every day, or
at least attempts to write. More at wwww.carolinebock.com
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Posted on Thursday, August 06, 2015 11:22 AM
 FISH SELL... was originally published earlier this year by the wonderful Washington Independent Review of Books...but I've been thinking a lot these hot summer days of my Pop and of his unorthodox real-world advice so I'm reprinting and sharing it here...
Beyond the Book
“Fish Sell” On seeing the
trade paperback of my book for the first time By Caroline Bock
The cover of Before My
Eyes hasn’t changed, but the feel of it has. Grittier. I expect it to smell
like cigarettes.
It doesn’t. I flip to the back first, as if the ending may somehow have
changed.
It hasn’t.
On the last page is an advertisement for another novel, LIE,
and I see that I wrote that, too.
I actually never forgot that I wrote LIE, my first novel.
Though sometimes it feels like I never published anything (except that poem I wrote
in third grade) — that someone else wrote all those words over all those years.
I can still remember that first poem. My father stared at it
and its “tall, towering trees” published in the school’s mimeographed newspaper.
“Toots, we got a writer in the family,” he said with his
kind of praise, expansive and vague. It took me a minute to know that he was imagining
me older, not 8 years old. Until that moment, I hadn’t particularly wanted to be
a writer.
If my father were looking over Before My Eyes, he’d ask the sale price first ($9.99), and then how
many I expected to sell (a lot, maybe). And then he might ask: “Why don’t I
bring the book down to Thunderbird?” He’d sell a few for me at his flea-market table
in Florida where he sold souvenir T-shirts to Canadian tourists.
“I can’t promise you how many books I’d move, toots. I’m the
guy known for the fish T-shirts, not books. Did you ever think of slapping a
picture of a shark on any of your novels? Fish sell, toots.”
You’ll notice that there is always a mother, damaged or dead,
in my novels. I’m working on writing a mother into my next book, but I may have
to kill her off. My father raised me, and I have trouble with mothers.
I have never seen a shark or written about one. Before My Eyes is about paranoid
schizophrenia, gun violence, and the teen psyche at the end of a long, hot
summer. It is largely set at the beach, but there aren’t any fish.
 Some people glance at Before
My Eyes and ask, “What age is this for?” because it is marketed as a YA
novel. I wrote it with teen characters surrounded by adults who don’t see what
is happening before their eyes. I think adults should read it first.
If you read Before My
Eyes, you’ll immediately glean that it starts near the end and moves
backward. The world is different if you think you know the answers, but you
don’t.
I see the world moving forward and backward at the same
time, roots overlapping one another, the trees from my first poem. I see myself
writing in notebooks at 8 years old and today. My father is gone, dead now, but
here with me, looking over my shoulder, talking about fish.
“Fish sell, toots.”
The
trade-paperback version of Caroline Bock’s Before My Eyes is now available wherever books are sold.
For more about the author go to www.carolinebock.com.
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Caroline Bock: Posted on Saturday, May 02, 2015 2:51 PM
From Girl on a Train to Robert Frost...I recently wrote a few haiku reviews... a great exercise in writing. Some are reactions to what I read, others are refractions of characters (i.e. the pool cleaner in Gatsby is in my imagination, not the novel's pages). Here goes...
For The Girl on a Train…
WOMAN ON A METRO
On a metro car: See or hear nothing, feel less. Days of driving rain.
For The Buried Giant… FOREVER TODAY
No past, no future— misted memories, but all connect, remember?
For The Great Gatsby…
THE POOL CLEANER
I cleaned the swim pool— after cops fished Gatsby out— more work, no more pay.
For The Collected Poems of Robert Frost…
A LOST WRITER
I don’t know these woods— what crossroad to travel now— lead me there, poet.
Have you ever tried a haiku review?
—Caroline Bock is the author of the critically acclaimed
young adult novels: BEFORE MY EYES (St. Martin’s Press, 2014) and LIE (St.
Martin’s Press, 2011). |
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Caroline Bock: Posted on Monday, April 27, 2015 4:57 PM
I write primarily fiction; however, I love poetry and since these are the final days of National Poetry Month, I am going to share with you notes from a fabulous writer's conference I attended, BOOKS ALIVE, sponsored by the Washington Independent Review of Books, an incisive online writing and book review community. This weekend, they honored poet and poetry advocate extraordinaire Grace Cavalieri with their first Lifetime Achievement Award. Upon accepting the award, she gave her top four reasons why poetry still matters (and I may be paraphrasing her, as I quickly took these notes):
-Poetry slows down time. You read slowly and you write slowly
-Poetry preserves the beloved
-Poetry makes us notice the world more
-We are more fully alive when we read and write poetry
This makes me want to write poetry, my secret writing, and to me that is the world.
Does poetry matter to you?
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Caroline Bock: Posted on Monday, April 13, 2015 10:38 AM
Three quick ideas for spring cleaning—for your writing.
Experiment with point of view. Ideas: 1) change
up a first person story to a third person 2) write
a story from a minor character’s point view 3) look at a picture sideways (see above) and describe what you see.
Two wise quotes on the current state of young adult fiction from the April 10, 2015 New York Times article with tastemaker editor Julie Strauss-Gabel :
1) “You go through vampires, you go through dystopian, you go
through contemporary, you go through fantasy,” Ms. Strauss-Gabel said. “The
last thing you want is an author saying, ‘That’s what’s selling right now, so
that’s what I’m going to write.’ That’s the point at which a trend gets icky.”
2) “We’re in an era where the
definition of a young adult book is completely up for grabs, and people are
willing to reinvent it,” she said. “There’s no one saying, ‘You can’t do this
in a book for children.’ ”
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Posted on Monday, January 26, 2015 6:36 PM
Cold. Ice-Rain. High Winds approaching. Stay Indoors! We're all hearing the warnings up and down the Northeast of the United States today.So I'm daydreaming of actors to play the key teens roles in BEFORE MY EYES——just daydreaming—but if you've read BEFORE MY EYES, you'll know it's set at end of a long, hot summer.
If you've read BEFORE MY EYES (and of course, you must, it's available everywhere books and ebooks are... here's an easy link:), you'll know that these are complicated, layered Long Island suburban teens at a breaking point in their lives, and we'll need the absolutely right mix of stars.
Even more particularly, if you've read, BEFORE MY EYES, you'll know that there are three main teen characters:
Barkley - 21, an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, having his first psychotic break, hearing a voice in his head, with a gun in his desk drawer, is breaking apart at the end of the summer as he tries to hold it together at the Snack Shack and at home
Claire -17 dreamy, poetic, Claire, takes care of her younger sister after her mother suffers a stroke, and is at her breaking point at the end of the summer
Max -17, soccer star, son of state senator, spending his summer working at the local beach's Snack Shack, popping "borrowed" prescription pain pills, and at his own breaking point
and two minor teen characters: Trish -17, funny, caring mother-hen of the Snack Shack Peter -17, developmentally-challenged, sweetheart-of-a-guy also at the Snack Shack, unexpected hero along with Trish.
If you've read BEFORE MY EYES, which young actors should play these characters?
And drum roll, the envelope, please, two thoughts on casting from the author of BEFORE MY EYES :
Just named one of the 11 Potential Breakthrough Actors at this year's Sundance Film Festival by Indiewire.
known for her role in "Glee"
Other thoughts? — If you've read the novel, of course!
Stay warm!
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Posted on Wednesday, December 31, 2014 10:39 AM
Best of 2014 and Looking Forward to 2015...
Best new place: Pittsburgh, one night visit included the
Carnegie Science Center and the Duquesne Incline. Looking forward to second
Pittsburgh trip in 2015.
Best New Thing About My Writing: Having BEFORE MY EYES
published in February by St. Martin’s Press… and returning to writing scripts
for television and film. Looking forward to diving into flash fiction, a new
novel and scriptwriting in 2015! Best favorite new bookstore: Politics and Prose in D.C.
(best 1-day class taken there with Leslie Pietrzyk)
Most unexpectedly best political movie of 2015 streamed on
Google Play: The Interview; going beyond the sophomoric bits of sex and drugs
and comic book action, this movie had a lot to say about the inherent evils of
dictatorial regimes (mass starvation, concentration camps) and how the media in
their countries and around the world props up the lies of these regimes.
Best new version of classic musical, which my nine- year old
daughter also loved: Annie.
Best movies about the inescapable human condition: Theory of
Everything, The Imitation Game, and Boyhood. Best New Exercise: Rookie Yoga.
Best TV Show: House of Cards, best new TV series: Madame
Secretary, and for summer watching with above nine-year old: The Strain. Looking ahead: TV series I
can’t wait for new season for in January (and no spoilers please from the Brits in the crowd!!) Downton
Abbey.
Most unusual thing I did in 2014, and one of the best: Late-night
party at burlesque bar in DC to celebrate friend’s birthday!
Best, best new thing… that all my family is healthy! Looking
ahead in 2015 to a new year of inspiration, writing, books, movies, and friends
and family.--Caroline
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