The Story List: Tour Guides

 

 

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.

https://www.robertellis.net

 

ROBERT ELLIS WRITERS BLOG

01/20/2024

The Story List: Beginnings, Part 2

Beginnings, Part 2

After finishing a book that I’ve read more than a few times, I was struck by what keeps bringing me back. It wasn’t just the hero that I liked so much, or even his opponent in the story. It was the direct contact between the two. It gave me chills. All of a sudden I had an emotional stake in what I was reading.

It’s something to think about if you’re early in on a new project. Your hero and his or her arch enemy having a personal encounter, or even a temporary alliance to go up against something bigger than themselves.

Imagine the possibilities …

Thomas Harris did it twice with Hannibal Lector, Will Graham and Clarice Starling in Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs. JK Rowling used this approach through the entire Harry Potter series with Harry Potter and Voldemort. And Sidney Pollack and Robert Towne played the beat to perfection with Gene Hackman and Tom Cruise as Avery Tolar and Mitch McDeere, when they rewrote, restructured, and revamped John Grisham’s novel, The Firm, in what many regard as one of best legal thrillers in the history of filmmaking.

https://www.robertellis.net

 

ROBERT ELLIS WRITERS BLOG

01/14/2024

The Story List: Beginnings

 

Beginnings. . .

As I think about reading a book or watching a film, if a story is really on fire, if the hero is in real trouble and the villain appears overwhelming, if it looks like the hero is trapped with no way out, no way to succeed or finish, no way to even survive the onslaught, all the way to the end, maybe even to the last page—I know I’m in the hands of a great writer. I also know that the story wasn’t a result of luck, magic, or, oh my God, the daughters of Zeus. The writer, like all real artists, knew something about the history of the genre and wanted to give it a push. The writer knew how the story would end before ever thinking about a beginning. A friend of mine who paints once told me that she sees the finished work in her head before she makes the first stroke. When I wasn’t surprised, she laughed.

https://www.robertellis.net

ROBERT ELLIS WRITERS BLOG

01/06/2024

 

Robert Ellis: Happy New Year to our January Free Book Contest Winners!

 

 

Happy New Year to Our Free Book Contest Winners!

Congratulations to Steve W. from Princeton, NJ, and Jane N. from New Castle, DE, for winning this year’s first Free Book Contest! Signed 1st edition hardcover copies of The Lost Witness, Book 2 in the Detective Lena Gamble thriller series and a real nail-biter, are on their way!

This contest has been running on the 1st & 15th of each month since August 2018! For more info, visit my website or send an email to robert@robertellis.net. Be sure to write “Book Contest” in the subject line.

Cheers to good reading for the New Year!

Robert

The Lost Witness on Amazon

ROBERT ELLIS WRITERS BLOG

01/01/2024