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

by John Truby

Withholding, or hiding, information is crucial to the storyteller’s make-believe. It forces the audience to figure out who the character is and what he is doing and so draws the audience into the story. When the audience no longer has to figure out the story, it ceases being an audience, and the story stops.

Most Hollywood films are linear. They focus on a single hero who pursues a particular desire with great intensity. The audience witnesses the history of how the hero goes after his desire and is changed as a result.

Thrillers like Vertigo, Blow-Up, The Conversation, and Memento typically favor the spiral, in which a character keeps returning to a single event or memory and explores it at progressively deeper levels.

Stories that emphasize simultaneous action tend to use a branching structure and include American Graffiti, Pulp Fiction, Traffic, Syriana, Crash, Nashville, Tristram Shandy, Ulysses, Last Year at Marienbad, Ragtime, The Canterbury Tales, L.A. Confidential, and Hannah and Her Sisters. Each represents a different combination of linear and simultaneous storytelling, but each emphasizes characters existing together in the story world as opposed to a single character developing from beginning to end.

We begin with the premise, which is your entire story condensed to a single sentence.

HARRY POTTER BOOKS • Premise A boy discovers he has magical powers and attends a school for magicians. • Designing Principle A magician prince learns to be a man and a king by attending a boarding school for sorcerers over the course of seven school years.

IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE • Premise When a man prepares to commit suicide, an angel shows him what the world would be had he never been born. • Designing Principle Express the power of the individual by showing what a town, and a nation, would be like if one man had never lived.

KEY POINT: Always tell a story about your best character.

To figure out the central conflict, ask yourself “Who fights whom over what?” and answer the question in one succinct line.

Your hero will take many actions over the course of the story. But there should be one action that is most important, that unifies every other action the hero takes. That action is the cause-and-effect path.

The key to doing this is to start with the basic action and then go to the opposites of that action. This will tell you who your hero is at the beginning of the story (his weaknesses) and who he is at the end (how he has changed).

Make the options as equal as possible, with one seeming only slightly better than the other. A classic example of a choice between two positives is between love and honor.

A true opponent not only wants to prevent the hero from achieving his desire but is competing with the hero for the same goal.

Come up with not one but many weaknesses for your hero. These should be serious flaws, so deep and dangerous that they are ruining your hero’s life or have the real possibility of doing so.

To create great characters, think of all your characters as part of a web in which each helps define the others. To put it another way, a character is often defined by who he is not.

Theme is not subject matter, such as “racism” or “freedom.” Theme is your moral vision, your view of how to live well or badly, and it’s unique for each story you write.

If you show the audience why the character chooses to do what he does, they understand the cause of the action (empathy) without necessarily approving of the action itself (sympathy).

A true coming-of-age story shows a young person challenging and changing basic beliefs and then taking new moral action.

Always begin at the end of the change, with the self-revelation; then go back and determine the starting point of the change, which is the hero’s need and desire; then figure out the steps of development in between.

Never think of the hero and opponent as extreme opposites. Rather, they are two possibilities within a range of possibilities. The argument between hero and opponent is not between good and evil but between two characters who have weaknesses and needs.

By identifying the negative as well as the positive side of the same value, you can see how each character is most likely to make a mistake while fighting for what he believes.

A great story is not simply a sequence of events or surprises designed to entertain an audience. It is a sequence of actions, with moral implications and effects, designed to express a larger theme.

You never want to create characters that sound like a mouthpiece for your ideas. Good writers express their moral vision slowly and subtly, primarily through the story structure and the way the hero deals with a particular situation.

Satire is the comedy of beliefs, especially those on which an entire society is based.

Irony is a form of story logic in which a character gets the opposite of what he wants and takes action to get.

Black comedy is the comedy of the logic—or more exactly, the illogic—of a system.

A note of caution: beware of visual clichés. It’s easy to fall into the trap of using natural settings in a formulaic way. “My hero is getting a big revelation? I’ll send him to the mountaintop.” Make sure any natural setting you use is fundamental to the story. And above all, use it in an original way.

A symbol creates a resonance, like ripples in a pond, every time it appears. As you repeat the symbol, the ripples expand and reverberate in the minds of the audience often without their being consciously aware of it.

The central story symbol in the Odyssey is in the title itself. This is the long journey that must be endured.

In the final line of the scene, the Godfather says, “Someday, and that day may never come, I will ask you for a favor in return.” This line, which sums up the negotiation, subtly suggests that a Faustian bargain has just been concluded and that the Godfather is the devil.

In the traveling angel story, the hero enters a community in trouble, helps the inhabitants fix things, and then moves on to help the next community.

If the Western is the national myth of the United States, you could argue that the King Arthur story is the national myth of England.

Joyce sets up a web of symbolic characters primarily by overlaying onto his story the characters of the Odyssey, the Christ story, and Hamlet.

Each time you repeat the symbol, vary the detail in some way.

Like Mordred of King Arthur, Maugrim of The Chronicles of Narnia, and Voldemort of the Harry Potter stories (English writers just love giving the bad guy a name with “mor” in it, perhaps because “mor” sounds like the French word for “death”), Morgoth conjures up in the minds of the audience the first antigod, Satan, and he is associated in name and action with death.

An organic plot shows the actions that lead to the hero’s character change or explain why that change is impossible.

The problem with the journey plot is that it usually fails to achieve its organic potential. First, the hero almost never undergoes even slight character change when defeating each of his opponents. He simply beats the character and moves on. So each fight with a strange opponent becomes a repeat of the same plot beat and feels episodic, not organic, to the audience.

The reveals plot is very popular with audiences because it maximizes surprise, which is a source of delight in any story. Another name for this is the big plot, not just because there are so many surprises but also because they tend to be shocking.

In certain genres like farce and caper (heist stories), this mechanical quality is taken to such an extreme that the plots have the complexity and timing of a Swiss watch—and no character at all.

The multistrand approach simply changes the developing unit from the single hero to the group. When the many strands are variations on one theme, the audience more readily experiences who we are as humans, and that can be just as insightful and moving as seeing the growth of a single person.

A storyteller is someone who recounts a character’s actions, either in the first person—talking about himself—or in the third person—talking about someone else.

The act of telling the story and the act of an audience listening to it, and silently questioning it, should partly determine how it turns out. The storyteller creates this give-and-take by leaving openings where he struggles with how best to tell it and lets the audience fill in the gaps.

The Shawshank Redemption: Andy’s great gift to his friend Red (the storyteller) and the other prisoners is to show them how to live life with hope, style, and freedom, even in prison.

For all its power, the storyteller has costs. The biggest one is that it places a frame between the story and the audience, and that usually drains some emotion from the story.

Most stories in movies, novels, and plays are founded on at least one genre, and are usually a combination of two or three. So it is important that you know what story form, if any, you are using. Each genre has predetermined plot beats that you must include, or your audience will be disappointed.

A scene is generally one action in one time and place.

The scene weave, also known as the scene list, scene outline, or scene breakdown, is the final step before writing your full story or script. It is a list of every scene you believe will be in the final story, along with a tag for any scene in which a structure step occurs.

The point of the scene weave is to get one last look at the overall architecture of the story before writing it. Therefore, don’t go into too much detail, because this will hide the structure.

Be aware that the average Hollywood movie has forty to seventy scenes. A novel ordinarily has twice that number and, depending on length and genre, possibly a great many more.

Instead, you want to choose a scene by how it furthers the development of the hero. If it doesn’t further that development or set it up in a crucial way, cut the scene.