Note: Transcript was created with AI and only slightly edited, so there might be errors and typos.

[00:00:01.100] – David Ellis
Welcome to episode 206 of Meet the Thriller Author, the podcast where I interview bestselling authors from the mystery, thriller, and suspense genres. I’m your host, Alan Petersen. And today we have an exciting guest, David Ellis. David is an Edgar award-winning author of 10 crime fiction novels, and he’s co-authored eight bestsellers with James Patterson. In addition to his writing career, David serves serves as a justice on the Illinois Appellate Court. We’ll dive into his career as both a judge and a writer, exploring how these two worlds intersect and influence his work. David’s novels have been translated into more than 10 languages, and he’s here to share his insights into his writing process, the challenges of balancing two demanding professions, and what fans can expect next. But before we jump into the interview, I want to let you know that my latest technological thriller, The Basement, is currently on sale for just 99 cents. If If you love suspensful creepy reads, don’t miss it. You can grab your copy at thrillingreads. Com/basement. Now, let’s get to it. Here’s my conversation with David Ellis.

[00:01:12.120] – Alan Petersen
Hi, David. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for coming on.

[00:01:14.620] – David Ellis
Well, thanks, Alan. Great to be here. Appreciate it.

[00:01:16.840] – Alan Petersen
I started reading your books years ago. James Patterson was one of the first books I read from yours, so it was my introduction to you.

[00:01:24.660] – David Ellis
Sure, yeah. A lot of people know me that way.

[00:01:26.810] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, that must be wild. I mean, you’ve been a judge. You’re all these incredible careers that you’ve had. But then to team up with the juggernaut like James Patterson, how did that came to be? Was it scary at first?

[00:01:43.910] – David Ellis
Yes, it was scary. Not because he made it scary. I think I did that to myself. So the long and short of it, if you want the background, is when I came out with my first book, which was basically like a ’99, right? It was a while ago. A book called Line of Vision. I was a nobody, right? So I sent my book around like you did back then. And today, you still do it. You send it to bigger authors to see if they’ll say something nice about it, give you a little blurb, right? So among the many authors we sent it around to was James Patterson. Even back then, he was one of the biggest authors in the world. And so he really liked the book. He really liked it and wrote a really nice blurb, and I was really grateful. Wrote him a little thank you note. When I went around to the bookstores in Manhattan, which back then, Alan, just to give you an idea how much times have changed, there were four mystery-only bookstores just in New York City, just in Manhattan. Now you’d struggle to find four in the whole country.

[00:02:41.780] – David Ellis
Brick and mortar stores. There were four just in Manhattan. And you went around each of them and you signed all the books they had. And everywhere I went, they said, Oh, you’ll never believe who was just here talking about you, James Patterson. And so that was really nice for a guy who was unknown, right? So fast forward to the year 2007, right? And Now I’m switching literary agents. And the guy who I hired was a guy who had been running Warner Books. He was the head publisher, the top guy at Warner Books, which has a bunch of imprints under it, including Little Brown, which is where Patterson writes. So he knew Patterson, of course, extremely well. They were friends. They would have lunch. So my new agent was having lunch with Jim, and they were talking, and he said, Tell me about your new job as a literary agent. You’ve switched sides. Who are your clients? He mentioned me, and And seven, eight years later, Jim was like, I know Dave Ellis. He wrote Line of Vision, which was my first book, and he said, I really liked it. And he started going off about all the things he liked about it because that’s how Jim works.

[00:03:41.510] – David Ellis
He’s got that a mind. He could do that today if you pressed him. What did you like about Dave Ellis’s book, his first book written 25 years ago? And he would tell you exactly what I did right and what I did wrong, by the way. So Jim was starting to have co-authors at the time, and they said, Hey, what about Dave being one of them? And he said, I’m game. And so my agent and I were having dinner in New York, and he said, What do you think? Do you want to write with James Patterson? And believe it or not, Alan, I was reluctant. And I think you touched on it. The reason I was like, Well, I’m not sure we write exactly the same. I’m not sure that would work. But I think really I was just nervous. I was just like, I don’t want to blow something like that. So he said, I’ll tell you what, call him, call Jim, and talk to him. Then if you don’t want to do it, don’t do it. But I think you will. I called him, and he was the nicest guy. He’s just the most down-to-earth guy you’ll ever meet.

[00:04:40.130] – David Ellis
He immediately started telling me everything he liked about Line of Vision, this book I wrote. At that time, it was seven years ago. I said, Jim, look, I’m incredibly flattered that you would think of me. I’d love to do it, but I’m not sure I know how to write a James Patterson book. He said the coolest thing to me, Alan. He said, I don’t want you to write a James Patterson book. I want you to write a James Patterson, David Ellis’s book. I want you to combine your skills. I know your skillset. I know what you’re capable of, and I know what I can do. And I think if we put our minds together and collaborate, we can do something really cool and fresh. And so I thought, how do you say no to that? And I’ve been working with him ever since, still am. And I don’t think there’s been a single day where he treated me like he was the boss and I was the employee. He is the boss, but he doesn’t talk to you that way. I mean, I’ve had a lot of editors as a solo novelist. I deal with people at publishing houses.

[00:05:32.490] – David Ellis
But here my editor is a best-selling author, the best-selling author probably in the world, who has forgotten more about bookwriting than I’ll ever know. So every time I talk to the guy, it’s like I’m taking a masterclass. He has a masterclass. You can find it on social media. I take that every time I talk to him, which is every couple of weeks. This day, I’m writing with him. I think our first book came out in 2009, I think. I’m still learning from the guy. He’ll be first one to tell you, proudly, humbly, we’re not writing Pulitzer Prize-winning books. He said, I’m not here to do that. I could maybe try to do that, but I’m not telling my readers that’s what they’re going to get. When I’m telling my readers what I’m promising them for the genre that I write with him on, because he has different genres, he said, For my genre, it’s going to be fun, fast-paced, entertaining, never boring, and surprising, fun. And he keeps that promise. And and he keeps me to that promise. Sometimes you can get caught up as a writer. I’m not sure you know what I’m talking about.

[00:06:37.320] – David Ellis
You can get caught up in writing something perfectly, getting every word just right and being really proud of it. But if it doesn’t advance the story, or if it slows down the pace, he’ll say, I always know I’m in trouble when he says, This is really good writing. But then he’ll say, But, and the but is a little long. We’re slowing the pace down. Let’s keep it going. He’ll always say it very nicely, but he’s always making sure he’s very particular about how every chapter should read, and it should never be boring. It should always have something centrally very interesting about it. No slow chapters, no boring chapters. Alan, that sounds easy to say, right? You step back and you say, Well, of course, Dave. Of course, every chapter. Who would want to write a boring chapter? But the truth is, when you’re writing a plot-intensive mystery or thriller, you’re going to have some chapters that are slower. Usually, at least, you’re stepping little stepping stones to the big islands that are the big moments. He doesn’t believe in little stepping stones. He’s like, Keep everything in fun. And maybe not every chapter is going to be surprising, but then do something else in that chapter that makes the reader feel rewarded.

[00:07:47.710] – David Ellis
Keep it short, keep it tight, keep short attention span world we live in, right? Nice crisp chapters, which I obviously do myself now, almost exclusively. And No, it sounds easy. It’s incredibly hard. He’s quite possibly the smartest human being I’ve ever met in my life. He just writes fun readers, right? It’s not rocket science. We’re not curing cancer. But again, he knows the pact he’s made with the reader, and he’s going to keep that pact.

[00:08:17.800] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, you mentioned his Masterclass. I’ve actually bought that on the Masterclass site, and I’ve watched it several times, and it’s the best one out there for writers. So FYI, for writers listening to this. And he even provided you one of his outlines for one of his actual books, the PDF. He’s, Here you go. I’m like, Wow. So you could actually see an outline from James Patterson. He’s just a real giving guy.

[00:08:45.690] – David Ellis
Yeah, no, he really is. He really is generous and giving, and he has no pride of authorship. There will be times when we write, that doesn’t happen often, but sometimes I’ll pop an idea up halfway through book and say, Hey, instead of doing this, why don’t we do this? And he’ll never say no just because it wasn’t his idea. He doesn’t care whose idea it is. That’s what a collaboration is. He treats you like a collaborator. He’ll always say, Let’s give it a shot. And if that works, cool. If it doesn’t, let’s go back and do what we planned, his ally. There’s a couple of books we did where that happened. One of them, to this day, says it’s one of the best books he’s ever produced. It came up with an idea midway through, and I said, Why don’t we do this? And he was a little skeptical, but he said, Try it. Let’s just take a few steps at a time. Show me what you’re thinking. And if we like it, great. And we just proceeded from there. So he’s like, it’s crazy because he could be a jerk. He’d be entitled to be a jerk with all his success.

[00:09:50.560] – David Ellis
But he’s the farthest thing from it. He’s so chill. He’s so laid back. He’s not laid back about the content. He wants it the way he wants it, but he’s so chill in how he presents it. He never makes you feel like you let him down, even though I know I have. He never gels. He’s just a pleasure to work with.

[00:10:09.130] – Alan Petersen
And now your latest solo book, The Best Lies, that came on on July 24th. So can you tell us a little bit about that? It’s just like you so much of the plot away, but I really enjoyed it. And we’ll talk about that later, about your characters, because you hear your main character here is a diagnosed pathological liar. That’s just fascinating. So he told us a little bit about it and then how you came up with those characters and the flaws?

[00:10:31.810] – David Ellis
Yeah. I mean, I’ve learned. I’ve been writing my own books for a long time. I took a break. That’s a whole story in itself. I took about six or eight years and didn’t produce my own work because I was a judge. I still am a judge, and I was writing with Patterson. My kids were young, and I got into a little bit of a fight with my publisher. When I started back writing my own solo books, I wrote Look Closer a couple of years ago, and then I’ve now written The Best Lies. That That time away gave me some time to reflect on what I did best and what I was good at and what I should emphasize. I had a lot of help from my wife, who’s very smart, even though she doesn’t really read this genre, she knows me. She said to me one time, You are at your best when you start with a character that really intrigues you. There’s this age-old debate, Alan, I’m sure you’ve heard it. You’ve probably participated in it where you say, What’s more important, the plot or the character? I used to answer by saying it was a false dichotomy, that they’re both equally important.

[00:11:35.120] – David Ellis
I still think that. I still think the plot is exceptionally important, but I think that by a vote of maybe 55 to 45, I would pick character over a lot. I do that because I think that if you are really intrigued by a character, you want to follow them wherever they go. Hopefully, no author is going to be dumb enough to take you into the waiting room with the DMV while they get their license renewed. You’re going to put them in situations that are interesting. But if the character is interesting, almost anything about them and what they do is interesting. If you just have a wooden character who’s doing all these cool plot things, there’s helicopters exploding and they’re engaged in gun fights, things I don’t really do very much of. But if that’s all happening in the context of a character you don’t really feel connected to, it feels a little wooden to me. I always start with the character now. I said to myself, What do I want to do for my next book? Look Closer was very successful. I’ve been actually blown away by how successful, and it put me back on a big map.

[00:12:36.990] – David Ellis
And it was a little intimidating. What do I do next? And again, start with character. I really got intrigued with the idea of beginning with the protagonist who’s a pathological liar, because I write books about psychological readers and deceptions, deceptions in every book I write. I thought, what if I start with a character who you know is deceptive, maybe even to the reader? And that really grabbed me. And then I said, okay, now let’s build the background of this character. And in my books, I find my character background becomes the plot. It becomes a lot of the plot. What made this person who he is today has something to do with what’s going to happen to him in the book. And so I thought, why would this guy, his name is Leo, why would Leo be a pathological liar? And I came up with a pretty crazy backstory for why that I thought worked really well. And he’s a very neurotic person. He’s very neurotic about numbers, for example. I thought that was interesting and fun to watch him be neurotic about numbers. At the same time, there’s a character reason why he likes numbers.

[00:13:41.470] – David Ellis
So it all fit together. I started there and I thought, What could I best do with a pathological liar? Then I just got intrigued about this idea of a lawyer who has such an oversize sense of fairness that he will stop it nothing to write a wrong. That’s Leo. He’s a criminal defense lawyer who sometimes in the justice system sees a real wrong, and he’ll stop at nothing to fix it, even if it comes at great personal expense to him. That’s how the book begins. It begins with him. I’m giving nothing away because it’s in the first chapter. He’s arrested for murder, murder of a very, very, very bad person. He very quickly finds himself caught in the middle of an undercover FBI operation. I thought, yeah, a pathological liar caught in the middle of an undercover FBI operation where he has to satisfy the FBI to get out of his criminal problems. He’s dealing with a very bad guy, the boss of the person who was murdered. I thought, I put a bunch of smart people together with a smart pathological liar in the middle. What can I do with that? And the possibilities were endless.

[00:14:52.930] – David Ellis
That’s really what the book is about. It’s a murder mystery. It’s also just an intellectual and psychological thriller of how this guy manages or doesn’t manage to extricate himself from a very difficult situation.

[00:15:06.420] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, that’s the interesting thing with your books, too, especially being that you’re an attorney and a judge. We’re talking before about James Patterson, about writing something that’s entertaining, but yet you know the legal system better than anybody. How do you balance that? You want to be accurate, but like you said, you don’t want to bore people at the DMV. Is that something you think about when you’re planning this, when you’re writing these?

[00:15:30.000] – David Ellis
I think about that every second of every moment that I’m writing, which is not all day. I only write in the mornings because once it hits seven o’clock, I have to be a judge. But yeah, no, you constantly think about those things. There’s that old phrase you probably heard, killing your babies. You might have something really interesting to say about the law, and you really enjoy talking about it because you’re me and you like talking about the law. It’s what I do for a living. You suddenly think, Wait a second, I just spent three quarters I have a page talking about the Fourth Amendment, and maybe people don’t care that much about the Fourth Amendment. Maybe they care a little bit because they do a little bit. People like insights. If you have expert knowledge, they want to know it, but they don’t want you to bore them to tears. It’s just a constant balance where you try to show them some interesting stuff, but keep it moving. That’s what Patterson would say, Keep it moving. That’s interesting. Say it. Tell us a little something. Hey, that’s cool. But then move on. Move on to what you’re doing in that chapter.

[00:16:27.860] – David Ellis
You’re doing the character, you’re doing the plot, what have So, yeah, you are constantly thinking about that.

[00:16:33.590] – Alan Petersen
And curious about your writing process, too, now. So I’m assuming because you work so much with James Patterson, do you outline your solo books, too?

[00:16:42.540] – David Ellis
I wish that I could. Jim has a talent that I have not been able to figure out, which is the ability to see the entire thing from the beginning. My books, as you probably know, are incredibly twisty. I analogize them to watching, say, an eight-episode show on Netflix or Amazon Prime, a thriller, where at the end of every episode, there’s some cliffhanger or twist that makes you want to keep going. That’s basically what I do. If I write an 80,000-word book, about every 10,000 words, I’m going to try to give you a twist that you did not see coming. So I’m constantly keeping you guessing. Not in an exhausting way. You can do that too much. I don’t do it too much, but enough that there’s every episode of the show, every 10,000 words, you’re like, Oh, my God, what’s going to happen next? That’s mostly what I’m aiming for it to do because I think that’s fun because that’s what I want to read. And by the way, I think I have actually forgotten the question you even asked me because I tend to ramble like this. I apologize. But that’s really what I’m shooting to do is I write the word fun on a post-it and I stick it to my computer, the same one I’m talking to you on Every chapter has to be fun.

[00:18:03.370] – David Ellis
That’s what Patterson says. Every chapter has to be entertaining in some way. Fun might be a bit of an overstatement. Some chapters aren’t fun. They’re scary or they’re heartbreaking even. But there’s something, there’s some exclamation point in each chapter. And so you make every chapter count. And for me, you throw in a twist every eight or 10 chapters to keep everyone guessing.

[00:18:24.130] – Alan Petersen
When you go back to writing with an outline, does that throw you off?

[00:18:29.000] – David Ellis
Oh, yeah, that was your question. Alan, if I could outline that whole thing, I would. Because if I could do that, I could write the book in six months. But my brain doesn’t work that way. I have some ideas when I start. I often know there’s often going to be a fairly big twist at the end, like there was in the best lies. I knew that twist all along. That was one of the first things I thought of. I won’t give it away. I won’t even reference it. It was just something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I thought that would be really cool to do in a book, and I thought this is the perfect book to do it. Did I think of every twist in the middle? No. I have a general idea of what’s going to happen in the plot, and I try, and I sit there. In fact, I’m doing that right now in my next book. I haven’t written very much of it yet, but I’m trying to foresee the plot twist. I just can’t. What happens to me as I start writing, I get invested in the characters, and then I start thinking, Oh, now that I’m getting to know them better and thinking what they may or may not do, hey, how about this?

[00:19:31.060] – David Ellis
What if this were true instead? Now, sometimes, Alan, that will happen on page 175 of my book, which means pages 1 through 174 are now going to have to be changed to fit my new idea. That’s inefficient. I freely admit I am an inefficient writer, but that’s how I do it. That’s how I roll, and I don’t see that changing. I’ve just got to embrace that. It’s hard to start a book not knowing everything you’re going to do. It’s scary because you could start, you could waste a lot of your time writing something and then saying, Oh, wait, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to do this instead. And now I just spent six weeks writing stuff I’m not going to use. That happens to me sometimes. But you have to embrace that if you’re me, because that’s the only way I know how to do it. And so far, it seems people are pretty happy with the work product. And so something is working. I’m just not writing as fast as I could.

[00:20:25.260] – Alan Petersen
Definitely. It’s working for you. You’re producing some great books. Even If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. I’m trying. I was also curious, too, because you said you’re an active judge. That’s your job. A very successful author. So I was curious, being a sitting judge, do you have to get permission? Do they know? Or you’re just curious how that works.

[00:20:54.410] – David Ellis
No, there’s no rule that says I can’t write books. You For the record, I do it between the hours of 3:30 AM to 7:00 AM. I don’t do it during working hours. And sometimes on the weekends, but frankly, the weekends usually end up being gobbled up by my family. My family basically starts waking up. My wife and my three kids start to get ready for school and work around 7:00, so that’s when I stop. Then it’s time to get ready myself and then put on the robe, so to speak, and be a judge. The good news for me is I’m on the Court of Appeals, so I write opinions. I don’t hear cases every day like a trial judge would. Criminal cases don’t where you are convicted or acquitted, I don’t try those cases. I don’t preside. I get the appeals out of Chicago, of all Criminal and civil. It’s all in writing. It’s all a written job. We might argue with the lawyers. I might argue on Zoom with the lawyers. Like I’m talking to you on Zoom right now. I’ll just have a different background. I think I showed it to you. I have a courtroom background.

[00:21:59.990] – David Ellis
But it makes it easier to manage your time because I’m less beholden to schedules. There’s less, Oh, I’ve got a bunch of hearings today in front of a bunch of different lawyers and parties. I don’t have those. I get the appeals. It’s all in writing. And so I can control my schedule more. But no, by and large, I work from 8:00 to 5:00 at least. Sometimes if I’ve got a big case that needs to get done, I’ll work on it at night or on the weekends. But it works. It’s worked so far. It’s hard. I’m not getting enough sleep, and I’m getting older, so it’s tough. But so far, I’ve been able to keep it up.

[00:22:35.500] – Alan Petersen
Yeah. The Best Lies, that came out on July 24th, and you said you’re working on a new one. And I saw that you also have another book with James Patterson coming out. I think it’s your 10th one on September 30th, Lies He Told Me. That’s available for pre-order now, by the way. So for the listeners, they want to go pick that up.

[00:22:53.320] – David Ellis
Yeah, that’s a really fun book that Jim and I did together, The Lies He Told Me. And we changed the title a few and nobody asked me about the titles. Jim makes those decisions. It’s funny, I’ve got the best lies, and then the lies he told me coming out within five months or three months of each other, or two months of each other, actually. So it’s funny, but that’s the stuff I write about. I like writing about ordinary people. You can do the supernatural. You can have someone like Superman or bullets bounce off. I’m like, That does not interest me. You can have a nearly superhuman person like a Jack Reacher. I love Jack Reacher books, and Lee Child, who created those, is someone I used to know pretty well, and he’s phenomenal. But that’s not what I write. I’m going to write about normal people who, in ordinary situations, would not transgress these boundaries we set for ourselves. They wouldn’t kill somebody. They wouldn’t create these fabric of lies. But they’re pushed to do it by extreme circumstances. I think people relate to that because I think Most of us are like that. I mean, I know I am.

[00:24:02.890] – David Ellis
I’m a pretty hum drum guy in my daily life, right? And I always have been. I was a good student in high school. I followed all the rules. I went to college, then law school, became a lawyer in a big law firm. I’ve really, by all conventional standards, I followed all the rules and done all the right things, right? I didn’t break the law. I don’t do anything crazy. But I was always more fascinated by the people who broke the law and broke the rules, at least. And I think we find those people interesting because we’re all just a few steps from to just cross that line and do something that you wouldn’t dream of doing. Yeah, I mean, I think that’s what I find interesting. People push to do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do. I think people can relate to that because we’re all basically ordinary people.

[00:24:45.110] – Alan Petersen
You got such an insight on that because you actually see that. As a judge, you’ve seen people at their worst and probably normal people who something happened. Do you ever draw from that, from your judge experience, put them into your books?

[00:25:01.840] – David Ellis
I’ve never specifically drawn from a real case. I’ve been inspired by cases. I’ve gotten ideas from cases. Certainly the legal side of it, the technology, when you talk about DNA, the ability to track people by cell phones, that’s a lot of stuff I learn on the job. But in terms of the people, you’re right. I do see a lot of people who’ve done bad things, but who are not necessarily bad people. There’s an element of tragedy to every criminal case I see. There’s a victim, but there’s also a perpetrator who also is in some ways, usually a victim, too. I think that’s interesting to people, and most people don’t look under the hood and see that. They’ll hear about a murder and they’ll say, Oh, that’s a bad guy. Well, that’s a punishable offense, and that person should be punished. The person isn’t necessarily a bad guy. If they are a bad guy, there is probably a reason why they become a a bad guy. I don’t really believe in that. I don’t believe in calling someone a bad guy. But if it’s someone who serially commits crime, there’s something that happened to them that made them that way.

[00:26:09.460] – David Ellis
I don’t think it’s genetic. It’s usually spawned by their circumstances. As you can imagine, you see a lot of very tough circumstances for these people. And so there’s an element of tragedy in all of it. But it’s also interesting because you can dig into the characters of these people in the books and bring them to life and make it real for people, for the reader.

[00:26:28.620] – Alan Petersen
I was asked by guests because I do have aspiring writers that listen to this podcast. What do you use to write? Is this Microsoft Word or something different?

[00:26:38.300] – David Ellis
Yeah, I just use Microsoft Word. My word processing is very basic. I have a cloud that saves it automatically. So if, God forbid, something happened, I could somehow manage to recover it. But yeah, I don’t do anything special. And I just work on this laptop that I beat to death for three years and then get another one. Yeah, no, it’s nothing. I like to keep it simple. I have a pretty simple workstation. I’ll play music when I write a lot of the time. One of the reasons that I like to listen to music when I write, there’s two big reasons. One is that if that is somehow slightly distracting me, it makes me less likely to be distracted by other things like the internet or my email. It makes me go off into a world versus sitting there just completely silently writing. Then I’m going to become aware of things and I’ll hear a little beep on my computer about an email I got, or I’ll go on the internet and search for something. The other reason I like music is it sets a mood for me. The same way it sets a mood in movies.

[00:27:43.020] – David Ellis
When you watch a movie, if something scary is happening, you hear scary music. If it’s something romantic, you hear that music. I will somehow, sometimes, tailor the music to what I’m writing. If I’m writing something really scary, I’ll put on some haunting music just to get me in the mood. If I’m writing something funny, which I try to have some humor in my books, I try to have a good amount of humor in my books, at least sarcasm, then it may be something more light-hearted that I’m listening to. I do recommend that. I recommend for readers, find the music that works for you. Some people can’t listen to lyrics, so they just play music. Sometimes I listen to cello music or violin. My daughter plays the violin, my son plays the cello. Of course, there’s no lyrics in that, but it can very moving music. So whatever floats your boat. If rap music is what you need, listen to rap music. But I do recommend music as a way to help you concentrate, ironically.

[00:28:40.150] – Alan Petersen
And then the last question before I let you go, especially with your background, and you have a very busy job and a family. So advice for sparring writers who maybe don’t think they have enough time to write. Can you give us some advice for that?

[00:28:56.200] – David Ellis
Well, first of all, you have to make it a priority. When I wrote my first book, I was working at a downtown Chicago law firm where I work till 10:00 every night. So I just made a deal with myself that I would spend at least one hour a night devoted to writing. Sometimes that would be from 11:30 at night till half past midnight. But I would do it, and I stuck to it for three years and wrote my first book. You have to have that discipline. If you don’t have that discipline, I guarantee you there’s going to be a million reasons not to work on your book that day, especially if you’re new, if you don’t have a book contract, if you don’t have a name, you don’t have expectations of you. If you’re just writing as an unknown person like I did, you have to make yourself do it. If it’s that much of it, sure, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. I viewed it as a labor of love. It was exciting for me every night after being a lawyer all day to get to play make believe. Sometimes that hour would be two or three hours because I was having so much fun.

[00:29:50.590] – David Ellis
In fact, that would often happen. My one hour could be more than that. But whatever you need to do, you do have to make it a priority. In the meantime, I would say, read good literature that inspires you, probably in the genre you want to write in. But even if not, even if it’s not the genre, good writing can inspire you. For me personally, good music will inspire me, good movies and TV. Tv and movies are blurring together now, right? Nowadays. That will inspire me. Like, great art inspires me. I want to be that good. I want to do that in my books, what you did on screen. Be around art that inspires you, preferably reading. The last thing I would say is writing is a muscle. You can take all the classes you want. I didn’t take classes. I taught myself how to write. What I did was I wrote initially and said, That’s not good enough. The one talent I had, Alan, was the ability to recognize that my work sucked at the beginning. I don’t know how else to say it. It just wasn’t that good. I read it after I wrote it and said, I wouldn’t want to read this.

[00:30:59.300] – David Ellis
This isn’t good enough yet. Let’s make it better. Then I rewrote it and rewrote it. It was just like lifting weights. I just got muscles, and I started learning it and saying, Okay, this is how you do it. You can teach yourself to write as long as either you have the ability to recognize bad writing of your own or you have someone you trust who will tell you. Because you’re not doing yourself any good if you’re not writing well, and you may not write well right away. Not everybody has that talent off the bat, but that’s okay. You don’t have to. You can teach yourself how to do it the right way. You just have to keep writing and keep working at it.

[00:31:31.850] – Alan Petersen
All right. That’s great advice. Thank you so much, David, for coming on the podcast. I really had a great time talking with you.

[00:31:38.250] – David Ellis
Thanks. Time flew. Thank you, Alan. Anytime. I’d love to come back.

[00:31:41.530] – Alan Petersen
Yeah, absolutely.

[00:31:42.800] – Speaker 3
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