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

by John Truby

W × A = C where W stands for weaknesses, both psychological and moral; A represents the struggle to accomplish the basic action in the middle of the story; and C stands for the changed person.

1. Weakness and need 2. Desire 3. Opponent 4. Plan 5. Battle 6. Self-revelation 7. New equilibrium

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

The trick to creating an opponent who wants the same goal as the hero is to find the deepest level of conflict between them. Ask yourself “What is the most important thing they are fighting about?” That must be the focus of your story.

Don’t have your hero come right out and say what he learned. This is obvious and preachy and will turn off your audience. Instead you want to suggest your hero’s insight by the actions he takes leading up to the self-revelation.

Need is the beginning of the hero’s character change. Self-revelation is the endpoint of that change. Need is the mark of the hero’s immaturity at the beginning of the story. It is what is missing, what is holding him back. Self-revelation is the moment when the hero grows as a human being (unless the knowledge is so painful it destroys him).

KEY POINT: Start by determining the self-revelation, at the end of the story; then go back to the beginning and figure out your hero’s need and desire.

Opponent Create an opponent who wants the same goal as the hero and who is exceptionally good at attacking your hero’s greatest weakness.

You want to give your opponent a special ability to attack your hero’s greatest weakness, and to do so incessantly while he tries to win the goal.

The single biggest mistake writers make when creating characters is that they think of the hero and all other characters as separate individuals. Their hero is alone, in a vacuum, unconnected to others. The result is not only a weak hero but also cardboard opponents and minor characters who are even weaker.

Audiences identify with a character based on two elements: his desire and the moral problem he faces—in short, desire and need,

Often the hero is initially wrong about his true reason for going after the goal and does not discover his real motive until the end of the story, at the self-revelation.

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.

Your hero needs to see through the great delusion he is living under to overcome the great weakness that is crippling his life.

But it is because of Darcy’s pride and prejudice and his efforts to overcome them for her that Elizabeth finally becomes aware of the pride and prejudice in herself.

The beliefs of the hero have no meaning, and do not get expressed in the story, unless they come into conflict with the beliefs of at least one other character, preferably the opponent.

In fact, one of the great principles of storytelling is that structure doesn’t just carry content; it is content.

WUTHERING HEIGHTS (novel by Emily Brontë, 1847, screenplay by Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht, 1939) Wuthering Heights is a love story written as a classic tragedy.

When you let structure do the heavy lifting to make the moral case, you free up the dialogue to do what it does best, which is provide subtlety and emotional force.

The fallacy here is that stories set in the future are about the future. They’re not. You set a story in the future to give the audience another pair of glasses, to abstract the present in order to understand it better.

Just as matter is highly concentrated energy, a symbol is highly concentrated meaning.

Let’s step back for a moment and look once more at how the various subsystems of the story body fit together. The character web shows a deeper truth about how the world works by comparing and contrasting people. Plot shows a deeper truth about how the world works through a sequence of actions with a surprising but powerful logic. The symbol web shows a deeper reality about how the world works by referring objects, people, and actions to other objects, people, and actions.

Story is a “many-faceted complex of form and meaning in which the line of narrative [plot] is only one amongst many aspects.”1

Make sure that all five of these elements—revelation, decision, obsessive drive, changed desire, and changed motive—occur, or this moment will deflate and the plot will flag.

KEY POINT: Dialogue is not real talk; it is highly selective language that sounds like it could be real.

KEY POINT: Good dialogue is always more intelligent, wittier, more metaphorical, and better argued than in real life.

Unlike so many stories that end falsely with the hero’s desire accomplished and everything settled for good, Fitzgerald ends on the desire that never stops, the effort that redoubles as our human goal recedes into the distance.

Since a story is always a whole, and the organic end is found in the beginning, a great story always ends by signaling to the audience to go back to the beginning and experience it again. The story is an endless cycle—a Möbius strip—that is always different because the audience is always rethinking it in light of what just happened.