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...
by Jamie Chavez | Aug 10, 2013 | Words & Language
Sometimes the words just come. Sometimes you just have a spark of inspiration. Sometimes you nail it. It’s happened to me; it’s probably happened to you. And you can live off the high of it for days. I read this short profile of singer-songwriter Paul Anka in Vanity...
by Jamie Chavez | Jul 13, 2013 | Words & Language
A longtime friend of mine stumbled onto one of those social media memes last week. “Count your age by friends, not years,” it went. “Count your life by smiles, not tears.” * It was credited to—wait for it—John Lennon. Riiiight. “I’d be willing to bet everything I...
by Jamie Chavez | Jul 4, 2013 | Words & Language
It’s Independence Day here in the good ol’ USofA, and some of us are taking a holiday. Seems like a good time to rerun a a post from a couple years ago. Oh, Say, Can You See the Imagery by the Dawn’s Early Light? Before it was a song, “The Star-Spangled Banner” was a...
by Jamie Chavez | Feb 28, 2013 | The Writing Craft, Your Editor Says …
I have spent a good bit of my life trying to learn how to write well. Writing well, I think, is one part practice (those 10,000 hours), one part reading other writers (good ones), and one part the study of fundamentals (grammar and craft). There may be other...
