by Jamie Chavez | Feb 27, 2017 | Books You Might Like
I spent a good little chunk of time reading Richard Russo last summer. (You may or may not be aware that I’m a Russo fan. So much so that I may have just this second talked myself into rereading Empire Falls, which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.) But we were...
by Jamie Chavez | Jan 16, 2017 | Books You Might Like, The Writing Craft
I’ve already written about The Summer Before the War—which I read first (and which is, in fact, the more accomplished novel)—but I really enjoyed Helen Simonson’s novel-writing skills in Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand (the New York Times calls it “funny, barbed,...
by Jamie Chavez | Nov 14, 2016 | Words & Language, Your Editor Says …
You know I love my thesaurus, right? I do. I have at least four of them, from various decades dating back to the ’40s (you’d be surprised how useful that is), as well as a rhyming dictionary, a slang dictionary, and something called the Flip Dictionary, which is more...
by Jamie Chavez | Sep 10, 2016 | The Writing Craft
I wrote a version of my WWYK article a year ago, but I wasn’t satisfied with it, and I let it sit for months until I could find the time to think about it and tweak it until I was satisfied. And now that I’ve finally published it, there is a best-selling book out that...
by Jamie Chavez | Aug 15, 2016 | The Writing Craft
Do a little search for this phrase—write what you know (WWYK)—and you’ll get all sorts of articles, some deeper, more knowing, than others. Some of these articles contradict. Some make the concept more difficult than it needs to be. But I’m here to make a case for...
