by Jamie Chavez | Aug 31, 2015 | Your Editor Says …
You’ve been there, I know. Those moments of extreme manuscript fatigue. You just want … to stop. I get these emails. Stop me if you’ve heard this one. 🙂 You: I will never finish this book. And it doesn’t matter, because it’s no good! In fact it’s crap! The writing’s...
by Jamie Chavez | Aug 14, 2015 | Creativity
In order to retrieve your creativity, you need to find it. I ask you to do this by an apparently pointless process I call the morning pages. … Put simply, the morning pages are three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness: “Oh, god, another...
by Jamie Chavez | Mar 23, 2015 | Authors & Other Writers, Creativity
A few weeks ago I saw this on Twitter—“Inspiration is for amateurs. Real writers write.”—and (as we say in the South) it just about made me lose my religion. Meaning it made me so furious I ranted about it on Facebook. What in the world is this person talking about?...
by Jamie Chavez | Mar 19, 2015 | The Writing Craft
We’ve talked a lot about the ways story ideas pop up. Interpretation of artwork, old family stories, historical or current events … Stephenie Meyer’s claim that it all came to her in a dream is the least interesting method to me, mostly because I don’t really believe...
by Jamie Chavez | Feb 28, 2015 | Miscellany
As you know, I’ve become interested in the nature of creativity and inspiration, and have written about it here several times—just this week, in fact.* Shortly after I wrote that post, I read an article by author Walter Isaacson in the October 2014 Vanity Fair … about...
