by Jamie Chavez | Dec 17, 2015 | The Writing Craft
The movie Jurassic Park came out on my tenth birthday. I loved it. The minute I left the theater, I was dying for a sequel, so I sat down the next day at our old PC and typed one out. In my treatment, the son of the game warden eaten by Velociraptors goes back to the...
by Jamie Chavez | Dec 10, 2015 | The Writing Craft
You can ignore everything else in this lecture except number eight. It is the only absolutely twenty-four-karat-gold-plated piece of advice I have to give you. I’ve never taken it myself, though one day I hope to. The advice is as follows. When you finish your novel,...
by Jamie Chavez | Nov 23, 2015 | The Writing Craft, Your Editor Says …
Not long ago an author friend of mine mentioned on Facebook that the book he was reading had too much repetition. “Characters frequently curl their fingers into their palms,” he said. “And everything smells like cinnamon.” In the amount of time it took three people to...
by Jamie Chavez | Oct 15, 2015 | The Writing Craft
Intellectual treat or not, the significance of all that blood was hard to miss once I started reading over my beer- and tea-spattered first-draft manuscript [of Carrie]. So I started to play with the idea, image, and emotional connotations of blood, trying to think of...
by Jamie Chavez | Oct 12, 2015 | Books You Might Like, The Writing Craft
Recently a friend of mine who has been blogging for years emailed me for some advice. “Can you recommend some great essayists?” he asked. He wanted to take his writing to the next level. “I’m not talking about reportage.” It’s an interesting distinction. Writing in...
by Jamie Chavez | Sep 17, 2015 | The Writing Craft
In “The Dead,” Joyce writes that Gabriel was his old aunts’ favorite nephew: “He was their favourite nephew, the son of their dead elder sister, who had married T. J. Controy of the Port and Docks.” This might not look like anything much, at first; perhaps one has to...
