by Jamie Chavez | Nov 16, 2015 | Creativity
The photo you see below stopped me in my tracks when I saw it on Facebook about a year ago. It spoke to me. Some of you may know these friends of mine—twins, their mother, and their aunt—but if you don’t, and if you’re willing to let your imagination roam, you...
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 17, 2015 | The Writing Craft
I wrote some fan fiction once. When I was twelve. It was a story about a young girl—she was pretty and smart and clever—who meets the Beatles. (Don’t laugh, now. They were hot—actually, cool—back in the day.) You can imagine who my protagonist was modeled after. 🙂 Of...
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 | Aug 1, 2015 | The Book Biz, The Writing Craft
In spite of the title, this post is really intended to encourage you. 🙂 My friend Beth Bates lives in the Indianapolis area, and through her I have been lucky enough to meet, in one way or another, several of her friends, writerly folk she knows from her time spent at...
