The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller

Product Information

In this book, I want to show you a better way. My goal is to explain how a great story works, along with the techniques needed to create one, so that you will have the best chance of writing a great story of your own. Some would argue that it's impossible to teach someone how to tell a great story. I believe it can be done, but it requires that we think and talk about story differently than in the past. A revolution for writers unfolded right in front of my eyes. BSW (Before Star Wars), it was a single-genre story world. ASW (After Star Wars), Hollywood knew we were in a multigenre universe. Popular stories from then on were going to be all about mixing genres. This was obviously a Fantasy in outer space, which meant elements of Science Fiction. But that wasn’t all. I loved the classic Western, but it had long since died. Now I was seeing all the Western beats in outer space. It was wild! And who doesn’t love King Arthur, one of the great Myth stories? I noticed some of those beats as well.

I'm simplifying this theory of story, but not by much. It should be obvious that such an elementary approach has even less practical value than Aristotle. But what's worse is that it promotes a view of story that is mechanical. The idea of an act break comes from the conventions of traditional theater, where we close the curtain to signal the end of an act. We don't need to do that in movies, novels, and short stories or even, for that matter, in many contemporary plays. Story World Next, we'll create the world of the story as an outgrowth of your hero. The story world will help you define your hero and show the audience a physical expression of his growth.

Quick Overview

Myths also give us social structures. An epic is classically defined as the story of an individual or family whose actions determine the fate of a nation. Homer’s epic poem the Iliad shows how monarchical rule combined with personal alliances and jealousies caused a ten-year war that destroyed everyone caught in its grinding slaughter. If you're ready to graduate from the boy-meets-girl league of screenwriting, meet John Truby . . . [His lessons draw] epiphanies that make you see the contours of your psyche as sharply as your script.”— LA Weekly

The Anatomy Of Story is concrete and practical without resorting to simplistic 'Three Act Structure' screenwriting cliches. It will be an indispensable guide to writing your first great script. Then, the perfect survival manual to help you negotiate the often confusing, contradictory and cutthroat world of professional screenwriting." -- Larry Wilson, co-writer /co-producer of BEETLEJUICE and co-writer of THE ADDAMS FAMILY I knew that John Truby was the master of Hollywood script and highly influential among fiction writers in novel and short story. But I was blown away by the profundity of his thought. It comes through in his books more directly than in his many videos. Imagine, if you can, a pre– Star Wars world. In the summer of 1975, Jaws was released in movie theaters throughout America. This realistic Horror story was based on a bestselling book. When Jaws turned out to be a monster hit, the film industry saw that the game went beyond the U.S. market. It was now about worldwide box office. The Anatomy Of Story is concrete and practical without resorting to simplistic ‘Three Act Structure’ screenwriting clichés. It will be an indispensable guide to writing your first great script.” —Larry Wilson, co-writer /co-producer of Beetljuice and co-writer of The Addams Family THE ANATOMY OF STORYThe book The Anatomy of Story is about the different elements that go into creating a successful story.

By the end of Worksheet One, you’ll have stated your premise, brainstormed some strong ideas about what will happen in your story, outlined the basic conflict, and gotten a good idea of who your main character will be. At work, we need to tell a compelling story to drum up business. A good story can determine whether we can pay the rent. Depending on how one classifies genres, there could be six, seven, thirty-two, hundreds, or even thousands. Here, we will work through what I believe to be the fourteen most influential of them. As a result, the plot was dense. And instead of getting the beats of one genre, like Fantasy, we were getting beats of Science Fiction, Myth, and Action, in rapid-fire succession.Consider this quote from Richard Flanagan’s novel First Person (2018). Scam artist “Ziggy” Heidl explains the reason for his success: Action is about being successful, not morally right.Myth represents a journey to understand oneself and gain immortality.Memoir is not about the past; it’s about creating your future.Fantasy is about finding the magic in the world and in ourselves to turn life into art.Detective fiction shows us how to think successfully by comparing different stories to learn what is true.Love stories reveal that happiness comes from mastering the moral act of loving another person.As we struggle to make sense of our place in the world, we think we have a clear grasp of the problems. But the problems we face today are based on how the world appears to work. Plato referred to these appearances as shadows. When we don’t understand how the world truly is—its deep structure—how can we fit into it? Seven Key Story Structure Steps The seven key story structure steps are the major stages of your story's development and of the dramaticcode hidden under its surface. Think of the seven structure steps as your story's DNA. Determining the seven key steps will give your story a solid, stable foundation. See how much I didn’t know I knew? This is when I feel a little thrill! I didn’t know I knew so much, and I’m chomping at the bit to start writing. He comes up with a plot and a scene sequence based on one question: What happens next? Often he sends his hero on a physical journey. He organizes his plot using the three-act structure, an external imprint that divides the story into three pieces but doesn't link the events under the surface. As a result, the plot is episodic, with each event or scene standing alone. He complains that he has "second-act problems" and can't understand why the story doesn't build to a climactic punch that moves the audience deeply. Finally, he writes dialogue that simply pushes the plot along, with all conflict focused on what is happening. If he is ambitious, he has his hero state the theme directly in dialogue near the end of the story.

For the rest of us, there is this book, which walks us through things like the steps that every story needs to have in it so a reader can connect to it. It helps us understand WHY we need to show the opponent's plan, even if we're focused on the hero's desires, because that's how we build the story. This book helps us understand how to map the relationships of characters in simple and complex webs, so that everyone we introduce to our audience has a reason to be there, and an internal logic that supports the story as a whole. I read this while I was working on my first novel, and I ended up taking six months off from my writing process, because I was learning so much from this book and I wanted to be able to use that knowledge while I was finishing the first draft. I can unequivocally state that this book make all the difference for me, and helped me take a bunch of ideas and scenes and assemble them into a proper _story_. And it does all of this not just through lectures, but by showing us how classic and popular works of fiction, literature, and film use the 22 steps to form their stories. Theme (Moral Argument) The theme is your moral vision, your view of how people should act in the world. But instead of making the characters a mouthpiece for a message, we will express the theme that is inherent in the story idea. And we'll express the theme through the story structure so that it both surprises and moves the audience. The main challenge facing any storyteller is overcoming the contradiction between the first and second of these tasks. You construct a story from hundreds, even thousands, of elements using a vast array of techniques. Yet the story must feel organic to the audience; it must seem like a single thing that grows and builds to a climax. If you want to become a great storyteller, you have to master this technique to such a high degree that your characters seem to be acting on their own, as they must, even though you are the one making them act that way. Most writers don't use the best process for creating a story. They use the easiest one. We could describe it in four words: external, mechanical, piecemeal, generic. Of course, there are lots of variations on this process, but they all work something like this. Film (especially American film) shows the small change a character might undergo by seeking a limited goal with great intensity.KEY POINT: Star Wars was exciting because the writer was weaving beats from multiple genres in a single movie. A great story describes human beings going through an organic process. But it is also a living body unto itself. Even the simplest children's story is made up of many parts, or subsystems, that connect with and feed off one another. Just as the human body is made up of the nervous system, the circulatory system, the skeleton, and so on, a story is made of subsystems like the characters, the plot, the revelations sequence, the story world, the moral argument, the symbol web, the scene weave, and symphonic dialogue (all of which will be explained in upcoming chapters). These beats are also why people choose to read or watch a particular genre again and again. If these classic plot beats are not present, the story will not be popular. Period. For example, a Love story without the “first dance” beat will have Love story fanatics up in arms.