Tour Guides
If a life creating art is a journey, if
writing is an art and I’m on that journey, then doesn’t it make sense that I
confer with a tour guide? Is the journey something I just do on my own? A long
solo walk without regard for what came before me, what’s happening now, or how
I might fine-tune my work and be unique? Is self-expression without form of any
interest or even relevant to anyone other than myself? To put it in an altogether
different light, if I had a choice between surgeons, would I pick the one who
didn’t graduate from med school? The attorney who didn’t pass the Bar? The
architect who didn’t study building and thinks engineering is overrated? What
about music? Did Beethoven wing it? Nine times?
Writing is one of the most complex of all the arts. With each new project a writer is asked to create an entire world. And within that world, bring characters to life, present conflicting needs and struggles on a cosmic level, and tie the whole thing up in a neat or not so neat resolution that makes sense.
If writing is an art, and art is a journey, I learned a long time ago that the only way I’d even have a chance at finding my way through the woods was to have a tour guide. And a good one. In my case, he was offering a writer’s workshop every Wednesday night for ten weeks at his studio in Westwood, California. The room was filled with novelists and screenwriters and a ton of executives from the movie studios. He's authored two must-read books over the past couple of years, The Anatomy of Story, and The Anatomy of Genres. John Truby.
ROBERT ELLIS WRITERS BLOG
01/20/2024
