by Jamie Chavez | Feb 4, 2016 | Creativity
The ability to listen is a skill we are honing. … Art is not about thinking something up. It is about the opposite—getting something down. The directions are important here. If we are trying to think something up, we are straining to reach for something that’s just...
by Jamie Chavez | Nov 12, 2015 | Authors & Other Writers, Creativity
Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing. Every great record or novel or comic book convenes the first meeting...
by Jamie Chavez | Sep 5, 2015 | The Book Biz
I’ve had more than one occasion to look up best-seller lists from decades past, often when I’m researching for this blog. I’ve read my share of books (and my mother read a lot before me, so those books were around the house when I was growing up), but … I haven’t...
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 | Jul 26, 2014 | The Arts & Media, The Writing Craft
Time magazine recently ran an article called “Sting’s Shipyard Serenade”* that I thought had an interesting line. Here’s the set-up: As the superstar front man of the Police, Sting wrote nearly every song on the band’s five hit albums from 1978 to 1983. For the next...