Book Tour Guest Post; Storytelling Magic by Andrew Toy

Hey Guys!
Today I have for you all the lovely Andrew Toy on the blog for you all with a guest post about his novel, The Man in the Box. Hope you enjoy his words and hope that it may even make you want to pick up his book!
And there’s also a tour-wide contest going on as well! You can enter at the bottom of this post.

Many people who read The Man in the Box told me that it was like watching a movie. I take that as a great compliment, because I was very intentional about writing it so it would be read that way.

Here’s the thing. When I was younger, I wanted desperately to be a movie maker. I dreamed of attending the Oscars and fantasized about Tom Hanks handing me over my award for Best Director.

But let’s be real, here. Yes, even as a semi-fantasy writer, I can be real. Even though I grew up just outside the walls of Hollywood, there was no way I had the tenacity to be a Hollywood celebrity figure. I lacked the swag and bling required to glitz down Sunset Boulevard in style.

I still dressed like Zack Morris well into the twenty-first century.

So, having missed that opportunity, I chose a new piece of equipment as my camera – my pen. Literally, my pen; I do most of my writing in longhand. With my pen I can zoom in on people’s emotions, capture the mood of a particular setting, and reveal over-the-top action scenes that otherwise would be too expensive to produce in real life.

People ask me who has influenced me as an author and expect me to list other authors as influences. To be sure, I am an avid reader just as all writers should be, and I have my favorites, as well as those whose style and word-forming I adopt and am continually learning from. But my influences often times come from the guys behind the silver screens.

Spielberg, Howard, Shyamalan, and all the brilliant filmmakers at Pixar Studios. These are my influences. Because they show me how to tell a story. Anyone can write a few sentences and string them together to write notes, emails, articles – and, if persistent enough – books. But few have the talent for telling stories.

And the crazy thing about filmmakers is, they’re telling stories without saying a word, or writing a sentence. If you think about it, they’re pulling off that magical stunt we all wish we could – speaking their mind. They’re literally showing us what’s in their minds. Telling a story by stinging visuals together, their absence not even brought to our attention. That’s storytelling magic.

And that’s what I tried to do here with The Man in the Box. I didn’t want any person feel like they were reading a book, but rather, that they were watching a movie with their mind’s eye. I want them to see the emotion on Robbie’s face when he can’t choose between his fantasy world inside the box or spending time with his family. I want the reader to laugh at Robbie’s arguments with his daughter, to actually experience the dinosaurs nipping at them from behind, to feel the hot breath of the ghosts breathing down their neck.

I want The Man in the Box to be a movie-reading experience no one will forget. And so far, to hear readers say it, it’s accomplished just that.