More thoughts from a thriller writer

On a visit to his family home in the Philadelphia area, Ohio University film student Robert Ellis watched his father look up from the novel in his hands and say, “Bobby, you’ve got to read this wheelchair scene. This book is over the top.” Years later, when he was working in the film business and going regularly to readings and signings by his favorite authors, “If you asked them what their favorite books were,” Ellis recalled recently in a wide-ranging conversation with the Fairfield Writer’s Blog near his Black Rock home, “every one of them included Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon. Every single one.”

After he turned an unsold screenplay into his first novel, Access to Power, in 2001, Ellis began planning his next book. “My dad had just passed away,” he said. “I wanted it to be a tribute to him, I wanted to set it in Philadelphia and the neighborhoods where I grew up, and I noticed that those writers, like Michael Connelly with The Poet, all had tributes to this remarkable Red Dragon. I was going to do mine.” The Dead Room, with neophyte lawyer Teddy Mack the protagonist, sold out 45,000 paperback-original   copies in three months.

“I always thought Teddy would be my guy,” Ellis says. Instead, his next three thrillers—the newest of which, Murder Season (Minotaur—right), comes out on December 6—feature LAPD robbery/homicide detective Lena Gamble. Here, with specific thoughts about thrillers, is the second installment of Ellis’ writing advice for readers of the FWB.

Make it about more than a crime: While some might dismiss Red Dragon as a horror novel, Ellis says that is mistaken. He believes intelligent crime novels are the modern equivalent of the great Westerns by directors such as John Ford, metaphorical works of the American myth. In that sense, he argues, Red Dragon “is a mapping of the human spirit and is ingeniously told,” with villain Francis Dolarhyde so mesmerized by William Blake’s art that he actually eats a painting. “What we’re seeing,” Ellis argues, “is a character trying to shed his past just the way a caterpillar becomes a butterfly.” In the same way, he says, “I don’t think my books are about the crime. It’s a metaphor. It’s hidden social criticism. My books are about more than the crime.”

Tell a multi-tiered story: Ellis says his thrillers tell three stories in one book: “There is the apparent level. That’s what you think the story is. There’s the level that the [protagonist’s] opponent is trying to make it look like it is. And then there’s the level that’s real.” Such tiered storytelling requires planning, says Ellis: “You can’t do that without an outline. [See FWB, October 12, 2011] Any writer who’s doing to do a multi-layered story and says ‘I don’t outline’ is full of it.”

Ask yourself, what if? At some point in an Ellis thriller, and perhaps at more than once, there comes a twist that turns the story on its head. “Was it in the outline?” he says. “Not all the time. There’s always magic. You’ll be writing there and you’ll say, Oh my God, what if? In The Lost Witness, I wasn’t sure it was going to work. I had to write it to know if it was going to work.” But don’t be afraid to try, because “Those little hits are like gasoline. The story’s going along, but now we need a jolt. . . . As long as it works.”

Get past the three-act structure: Despite the conventional wisdom in storytelling manuals, Ellis says, “I think the concept of three acts, if that’s what you’re doing, may mean you’re not going to make it today.” In a contemporary thriller, two big plot points—dividing Act I from II and Act II from III—are not enough. “You need more of those hits than just something that separates an act,” Ellis says “The more the better. And if you can pack the end—boom, boom, boom, boom—well, that’s what I try to do.”

Change your template: “Usually the new book is a reaction to the last book,” Ellis says. In the first Lena Gamble novel, City of Fire, Gamble is an unsure newcomer to the LAPD Robbery/Homicide division. In The Lost Witness, she is assigned a seemingly dead-end case by unhappy higher-ups looking to get rid of her. Now, in Murder Season, “It’s the opposite,” Ellis says of his protagonist and her bosses. “Now they need her.” Gamble investigates a high-profile killing that could make her a scapegoat for police-department and district attorney’s-office bumbling. The story involves “a character shift,” says Ellis, who this time took his inspiration from an even more-detailed outliner than Ellis himself, James Ellroy, who has been known to compose a 300-page plan before turning it into a novel. “I’ve been wanting to do this since I read LA Confidential.”

Establish a theme with the thrills: While his thrillers have whodunit and police-procedural elements, Ellis says they are much different from mysteries: “In a detective story, there’s a murder on page one and we’re off.  Mysteries are faster at the beginning. Thrillers are slow in the beginning. A thriller is a very personal story. You’ve got to get that personal stuff out and done so that when you get to the end the thrills resound.” He cites an Alfred Hitchcock movie to illustrate his point. “Look at ‘Rear Window.’ The first 30 minutes, nothing happens. Jimmy Stewart’s just sitting in his room talking to Grace Kelly (below) and talking to his nurse about marriage.

“That’s another thing about a thriller, the difference between it and a mystery. Usually you have a stronger theme in a thriller, and every character in that story shares a part of that theme. For instance, in ‘Rear Window,’ it’s about love and marriage. In every one of those windows [Stewart and Kelly are looking at], it’s a variation of a theme, such as the apartment with Miss Lonelyhearts.”

A reading recommendation: So what’s the best book our local thriller writer has read recently? The latest Michael Connelly offering? Or one of Thomas Harris’ evergreen titles, given that he hasn’t published anything in five years? Nope. “Nonfiction,” Ellis says. “Unbroken.” That’s right, Laura Hillenbrand’s story of Olympic runner, World War II hero and Japanese POW survivor Louis Zamperini.—Alex McNab

Insight from a best-selling thriller writer

One day in 1997, when current Black Rock resident Robert Ellis (right) walked out of the Fox studio offices in Los Angeles after an unsuccessful pitch meeting for his screenplay, he stopped at a nearby bookstore where author Michael Connelly was appearing on behalf of his latest Harry Bosch crime novel. Ellis had had good reason to be optimistic about his script’s chances at Fox. As a student at Ohio University, where Ellis studied film, one of his writing professors was Walter Tevis, author of two novels that became notable movies, “The Hustler” (starring Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason) and “The Man Who Fell To Earth” (starring David Bowie). In L.A., Ellis produced, directed and wrote for film, TV and advertising. Now, his arms loaded with multiple copies of Trunk Music for himself and his friends, he struck up a conversation with Connelly about writing novels as the author was signing the books.

“And the next day,” Ellis recalls, “I said, OK, I’m going to turn this screenplay into a novel. Happily, I sold it in about three days.”

Access to Power, which is set in Washington, D.C., was published in 2001. The following year The Dead Room, featuring young Philadelphia lawyer Teddy Mack, hit the shelves. In all, Ellis has written five thrillers, the most recent three featuring LAPD Robbery-Homicide detective Lena Gamble. The last book of that trilogy, Murder Season, will arrive in stores from Minotaur Books in December. The first, City of Fire (2007), made the Los Angeles Times bestseller list, and both it and the second, The Lost Witness (2009), have been racking up big sales in Europe in 2011, achieving top-20 positions among books and top-10 status among ebooks sold in Germany.

In a recent wide-ranging conversation—not surprisingly, frequently illuminated by movie references—Ellis offered readers of the Fairfield Writer’s Blog insights on the following:

Outlining: The crafting of an Ellis thriller comes down hard on one side of the plotter vs. pantser debate (for more, click back to the FWB of March 18, 2010). No seat-of-the-pants improvising for this author. “My outline for The Last Witness was a hundred pages long,” he says. “First I do what I call a bullet outline, which is one sentence per chapter. Exactly what’s going to happen in that chapter, so I can watch the flow of story.” He follows “what [director] John Ford always said about a scene. And that is, one action, one scene.” From his bullet outline, he writes the more elaborate outline, incorporating ideas from his notes and research in the relevant scene.

Writing: With that lengthy second outline, most of Ellis’ story-building work is done. “Number one on the outline becomes Chapter 1,” he says. The result is that, for all intents and purposes, “You read my first draft. I write a chapter and then I re-read it. The next day I go over it again, and then I move on to the next, and it’s done. When it’s all done I’ll go through the whole thing and polish.”

As for his style, “I write as speech, not language. I write the way we internally think. I try to keep things as simple as I can.” Like a lot of thriller writers, that means he is not loath to use sentence fragments. “That’s OK, though, because that’s the way we think. Sometimes you can get underneath somebody’s skin easier that way, with the staccato.”

Character: “You’ve got to put what you do in your characters or they’re not going to be alive,” Ellis says. I can attest to that. More than once in The Lost Witness, Lena Gamble is listening to songs played by great blues guitarists. I knew the guitarists, had see them play in person and, in the case of the late Mike Bloomfield, had a CD with the song “Stop!”—which Lena was listening to in one scene—sitting on the windowsill right above my writing desk!

Become your character, Ellis advises, when you come to a halt in writing your story. “All plot is is what the character does. The story is a handshake between the two, plot and character. Really, if you’re ever in a fix, it’s, what would my character do? That’s the fix for the plot. What would anyone do? Does it make sense? Does this character have a reason to do this? What is this character’s goal? What are they trying to get out of this, in this situation?”

Adding Background: When reading a book, even a crime novel, “everybody likes to learn something,” Ellis says. In The Lost Witness, he weaves in compelling information about the negative effects of ties among pharmaceutical companies, Gulf War veterans and medical drugs. “There’s a secret. It’s the same with most exposition, and that is, slide it in, pepper it in, in a scene that has conflict. Like in The Dead Room. I wanted you to know Teddy’s past. So I put him in his car. He’s looking at the temperature gauge. He’s scared to death that he’s driving on ice and his tires are slipping. All that exposition is in a scene where you’re worrying about him. In each chapter you may do a little thing. All those things add up in the end.”

Moving Forward: Ellis recommends that you “do what [another noted Southern California crime writer] T. Jefferson Parker says, write the one page and move on to the next. Don’t worry. Do not worry. Know what you are trying to say in that chapter, what the end point of that chapter is, and get there. The first hundred pages are really hard because you’ve got to do all the setting up. It’s painful. But once you get over that hump. . . .”

Fighting Fear: At some point, every writer, even one with five novels to his credit, dreads facing the blank page on the computer screen. It’s not a fear of the act of creation, Ellis says, it’s a fear of meeting expectations. With each project, you want to improve, to write your best book ever. “It only gets worse, the fear, at least in my experience,” Ellis admits. When he first moved to California, he became friends with director Sydney Pollack’s assistant. Pollack’s films won 11 Academy Awards and he received Oscars for directing and producing “Out of Africa” in 1985. Yet the assistant, Ellis says, “told me that, before every project, he (Pollack) was scared. I think it’s a good thing, but sometimes it gets in the way. You’re facing the unknown. You don’t want to mess it up. That’s a big part of it. It’s natural.”

Story—and More: “If you are a storyteller, it doesn’t matter what medium you’re working in,” Ellis says, before adding, “But it was when I was writing my first novel that I realized, Oh my God, I can get inside the guy’s head. Film is just a blueprint. One thing I loved about Connelly’s books was the internal creation of the main character. Robert Crais [yet another of the top L.A. crime novelists] in the Joe Pike series does it. I really love doing that. That’s the only advantage a novel has, and the reason why I hope they never go away.”—Alex McNab

PS. Next time, I’ll post more from Robert Ellis, including his ideas on what you can do when writing a thriller that you can’t do when writing a mystery (with tips from Thomas Harris and Alfred Hitchcock) and where his new book takes the character of Lena Gamble.