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

by John Truby

When creating your four-corner opposition, pencil in each character—hero and three opponents—into one of four corners in a box, as in our diagrams. Then “push” each character to the corners. In other words, make each character as different as possible from the other three.

Theme is the author’s view of how to act in the world. It is your moral vision. Whenever you present a character using means to reach an end, you are presenting a moral predicament, exploring the question of right action, and making a moral argument about how best to live.

immorality to which the story leads, that of the townspeople who hide their own

could be rising. Heart of Darkness uses the technique of the two symbols but also

Over the course of the story, each of the major characters should make a moral argument in dialogue justifying what they do to reach the goal. (Good moral argument is done primarily but not solely through structure. We’ll discuss how to write moral dialogue in Chapter 10, “Scene Construction and Symphonic Dialogue.”)

Identify a set of values for your hero and each of the other major characters. Remember, values are deep-seated beliefs about what makes a good life. 2. Try to give a cluster of values to each character. 3. Make each set of values as different from the others as possible. 4. As your hero and his opponents fight over the goal, make sure their values come into direct conflict.

least two secondary opponents. This gives

KEY POINT: Your moral argument will always be simplistic if you use a two-part opposition, like good versus evil. Only a web of moral oppositions (four-corner opposition is one such web) can give the audience a sense of the moral complexity of real life.

First Immoral Action The hero almost immediately acts in some way that hurts others. This is evidence to the audience of the hero’s basic moral flaw. • Desire The hero comes up with a goal toward which all else is sacrificed.

The most common place to use dialogue to express moral argument is when an ally criticizes the hero for taking an immoral action while trying to win the goal. The ally contends that the hero’s actions are wrong. The hero, who hasn’t yet had a self-revelation, defends his actions. A second way that moral argument comes out in dialogue is in a conflict between the hero and the opponent. This can happen anywhere over the course of the story but is most likely during a battle scene. A classic example of a moral argument in a battle scene occurs between Fast Eddie and his ex-manager, Bert, in The Hustler. In It’s a Wonderful Life, a great moral argument between hero and opponent occurs much earlier in the story when George stops Potter from getting rid of his father’s Building and Loan. The great advantage of an early moral argument between hero and opponent is that it gives the audience a clue about what values are really at stake, and that allows the drama to build. A third place to use moral dialogue, and a mark of really good writing, is a scene in which the main opponent gives a moral justification for his actions, even though he is wrong. Why is moral dialogue from the opponent so crucial to making your overall moral argument?

Gaston Bachelard, in his classic book The Poetics of Space, explains “the drama that attaches to the dwellings of men.”1 Meaning is embedded in all kinds of forms and spaces, from shells to drawers to houses. His main point is crucial for the storyteller: “Two kinds of space, intimate space and exterior space, keep encouraging each other … in their growth.”

1. Create a large umbrella and then crosscut and condense. In this approach, you describe the largest scope of the story somewhere near the beginning. In effect, you start with the big world and the wall that divides it from everything else. Then you focus on the smaller worlds within the arena as the story progresses. This large umbrella could be as big as the flat plain of the West, a city, outer space, or the ocean, or it could be as small as a small town, a house, or a bar. This technique can be found in Casablanca, Alien, Spider-Man, L.A. Confidential, The Matrix, Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, Mary Poppins, Groundhog Day, Sunset Boulevard, Nashville, Blood Simple, Meet Me in St. Louis, The Great Gatsby, Shane, Star Wars, and It’s a Wonderful Life.

Make the hero a fish out of water. Start the hero in one arena. Spend enough time there to show whatever talents he has that are unique to that world. Then jump the character to a second world—without traveling—and show how the talents the hero used in the first world, while seeming to be out of place, work equally well in the second. This approach is found in Beverly Hills Cop, Crocodile Dundee, Black Rain, and to a lesser but still important extent in Witness and Dances with Wolves. Strictly speaking, fish-out-of-water stories take place in two distinct arenas, not one. Consequently, they often feel like two-part stories. What holds them together is that the hero uses the same talents in both places, so the audience comes to feel that while both arenas are superficially quite different, they are in a deeper sense the same. One of the keys to using the fish-out-of-water technique is to avoid staying too long in the first arena. The first arena is the jumping-off point for the main story, which takes place in the second arena. The first arena has fulfilled its function as soon as you show the hero’s talents in that world.

and emotional passage is found in Adventures

What makes the bar in Casablanca unique as a story world, and incredibly powerful for the audience, is that it is both a dystopia and a utopia. This bar is where the

Opposite the warm house, the terrifying house is usually a house that has gone over the line from cocoon to prison. In the best stories of this kind, the house is terrifying because it is an outgrowth of the great weakness and need of the character. This house is the hero’s biggest fear made manifest.

Eventually, the family falls and, when the story is taken to the extreme, the house burns, devours them, or collapses on them. Examples are “The Fall of the House of Usher” and other stories by Poe, Rebecca, Jane Eyre, Dracula, The Innocents, The Amityville Horror, Sunset Boulevard, Frankenstein, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and stories by Chekhov and Strindberg.

In more modern stories, the terrifying house is a prison because it is not big and diverse. It is small and cramped, with thin walls or no walls at all. The family is jammed in, so there is no community, no separate, cozy corners where each person has the space to become who he uniquely should be. In these houses, the family, as the basic unit of drama, is the unit of never-ending conflict. The house is terrifying because it is a pressure cooker, and with no escape for its members, the pressure cooker explodes. Examples are Death of a Salesman, American Beauty, A Streetcar Named Desire, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Glass Menagerie, Carrie, Psycho, and The Sixth Sense.

Inside the house, the central opposition is between cellar and attic. The cellar is underground. It is the graveyard of the house, where the dead bodies, the dark past, and the terrible family secrets are buried. But they are not buried there for long. They are waiting to come back, and when they finally do make it back to the living room or the bedroom, they usually destroy the family.

The cellar is also where plots are hatched. Plots come from the darkest part of the house and the darkest part of the mind. The cellar is the natural workplace of the criminal and the revolutionary. This technique is used in Notes from the Underground, The Lavender Hill Mob, The Silence of the Lambs, and M.

The attic, like the cellar, is a place where things are hidden away. Because the attic is the “head” of the house, these hidden things, when they are terrifying, have to do with madness (Jane Eyre, Gaslight). But more often the hidden things are positive, like treasures and memories. A character discovers an old chest in the attic that opens a window into who that character was or the character’s forebears.

The house is the simultaneous story, everything happening at once. The road is the linear story, one thing happening along a line of development.

George Sand wrote, “What is more beautiful than a road? It is the symbol and the image of an active, varied life.”8

The hero has not created his unique self in that safe place, or he has felt enslaved. The road forces him to test his abilities. But in myth, he will not become someone new on the road. He must return home, this time to realize who he always was, but in a deeper way.

To codify the vast scope of the city, storytellers shrink the city down to a smaller microcosm. One of the most popular is the institution. An institution is an organization with a unique function, boundaries, set of rules, hierarchy of power, and system of operation. The institution metaphor turns the city into a highly organized military operation where vast numbers of people are defined and relate to one another strictly by their function in the whole. Typically, a writer portraying the city as an institution creates a single large building with many levels and rooms, including one immense room with hundreds of desks in perfect rows. The city as institution is found in The Hospital, American Beauty, Network, Double Indemnity, The Incredibles, and The Matrix.

In the vast majority of stories, the hero’s overall change moves from slavery to freedom. If that’s true in your story, the visual world will probably move from slavery to freedom as well. Here’s how the overall movement of character and world match up. A character is enslaved primarily because of his psychological and moral weaknesses. A world is enslaving (or freeing) based on the relationship of the three major elements—land (natural settings), people (man-made spaces), and technology (tools)—and how they affect your hero. The unique way you combine these elements defines the nature of the story world. •

And since in the vast majority of stories your hero begins the story enslaved in some way, you must focus on slavery. KEY POINT: Always ask yourself, how is the world of slavery an expression of my hero’s great weakness? The world should embody, highlight, or accentuate your hero’s weakness or draw it out in its worst form.

advanced. • System If your hero lives and works in a system (or systems), explain the rules and hierarchy of power, along with your hero’s place in that hierarchy. If a larger system is enslaving your hero, explain why he is unable to see his own enslavement.

As a first-year student who is only eleven, Harry is at the bottom of the hierarchy in this world. His great potential suggests he will rise to the top over the course of the seven stories and seven years. But for now he represents the audience, and they learn how this magical system works at the same time he does.

Here’s how it works: you start with a feeling and create a symbol that will cause that feeling in the audience. You then repeat the symbol, changing it slightly.

symbols to any or all of these elements: the entire story, the structure, characters, theme, story world, actions, objects, and dialogue. STORY SYMBOLS At the level of the story idea or premise, a symbol expresses the fundamental story twists, the central theme, or the overall story structure and unifies them under one image. Let’s look at some examples of story symbols. THE ODYSSEY The central story symbol in the Odyssey is in the title itself. This is the long journey that must be endured. ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN The central symbol here, by contrast, is not Huck’s journey down the Mississippi; it is the raft. On this fragile, floating island, a white boy and a black slave can live as friends and equals.

Natural worlds like the island, mountain, forest, and ocean have an inherent symbolic power. But you can attach additional symbols to them to heighten or change the meaning audiences normally associate with them.

But making a place magical has the same effect as applying a symbol. It concentrates meaning and charges the world with a force field that grabs an audience’s imagination.

KEY POINT: Your plot depends on how you withhold and reveal in formation. Plotting involves “the masterful management of suspense and mystery, artfully leading the reader through an elaborate … space that is always full of signs to be read, but always menaced with misreading until the very end.”2

KEY POINT: If your hero begins the story enslaved in some way, the story world will also be enslaving and should highlight or exacerbate your hero’s great weakness.

This is an event from the outside that causes the hero to come up with a goal and take action. The inciting event is a small step, except for one thing: it connects need and desire. At the beginning of the story, when weakness and need are being established, the hero is typically paralyzed in some way. You need some kind of event to jump-start the hero out of his paralysis and force him to act.

KEY POINT: To find the best inciting event for your story, keep in mind the catchphrase “from the frying pan into the fire.”

The best inciting event is one that makes your hero think he has just overcome the crisis he has faced since the beginning of the story. In fact, due to the inciting event, the hero has just gotten into the worst trouble of his life.

Here are the levels of some classic desire lines, from lowest to highest: 1. Survive (escape) 2. Take revenge 3. Win the battle 4. Achieve something 5. Explore a world 6. Catch a criminal 7. Find the truth 8. Gain love 9. Bring justice and freedom 10. Save the Republic 11. Save the world 6.

The subplot must affect the hero’s main plot, or it shouldn’t be present at all. If the subplot doesn’t serve the main plot, you have two simultaneous stories that may be clinically interesting to the audience, but they make the main plot seem too long. To connect the subplot to the main plot, make sure the two dovetail neatly, usually near the end.

If you are going to use a subplot, you only have enough time to work through the seven key steps. But be aware that if you can’t cover all seven, it won’t be a complete story and will seem forced. Because of the limited time, you want to introduce your subplot as early in the story as is naturally appropriate.

The best opponent is the necessary one: the character best able to attack the great weakness of your hero. Your hero will be forced either to overcome that weakness and grow or else be destroyed.

A mysterious opponent is more difficult to defeat. In average stories, the hero’s only task is to defeat the opponent. In good stories, the hero has a two-part task: uncover the opponent and then defeat him. This makes the hero’s job doubly difficult and his success a far greater accomplishment.

What does the opponent want? He should be competing for the same goal as the hero. • What are the opponent’s values, and how do they differ from the hero’s? Most writers never ask this question, and it’s a big mistake. A story without a conflict of values, as well as characters, cannot build.

PLOT TECHNIQUE: THE ICEBERG OPPONENT Making the opponent mysterious is extremely important, no matter what kind of story you are writing. Think of the opponent as an iceberg. Some of the iceberg is visible above the water. But most of it is hidden below the surface, and that is by far the more dangerous part. There are four techniques that can help you make the opposition in your story as dangerous as possible: 1. Create a hierarchy of opponents with a number of alliances. All of the opponents are related to one another; they are all working together to defeat the hero. The main opponent sits at the top of this pyramid, with the other opponents below him in power. (See our discussion of four-corner opposition in Chapter 4. An example of this technique as used in The Godfather can be found at the end of this chapter.)

Hide the hierarchy from the hero and the audience, and hide each opponent’s true agenda (true desire). 3. Reveal all this information in pieces and at an increasing pace over the course of the story. This means you’ll have more reveals near the end of the story. As we shall see, how you reveal information to hero and audience is what makes or breaks your plot. 4.

The best reveals are those where the hero gets information about an opponent. This kind of information intensifies the conflict and has the most effect on the outcome of the plot. 2. The changed desire must be a bend of the original desire, not a break in it. Think of the changed desire as a river that changes course. You don’t want to give your hero an entirely new desire at this point, or you have started a new story. You want to adjust, intensify, and build the original desire line. 3. Each revelation must be explosive and progressively stronger than the one that preceded it. The information should be important, or it won’t pop the story. And each reveal should build on the one before it. When we talk about the plot “thickening,” this is what is actually happening. Think of the revelations as the gears in a car. With each reveal the car (story) picks up speed until at the final one the vehicle is zooming. The audience has no idea how they ended up moving so fast, but they sure are having a good time.

KEY POINT: The revelation should be important enough to cause your hero to make a decision and change his course of action.

KEY POINT: Beware of having your hero simply play out the plan. This gives you a predictable plot and a superficial hero. In good stories, the hero’s initial plan almost always fails. The opponent is too strong at this point in the story. The hero needs to dig deep and come up with a better strategy, one that takes into account the power and weapons at the opponent’s disposal. CASABLANCA

The opponent comes up with a strategy to get the goal and begins to execute a line of attack against the hero. I cannot emphasize enough how important this step is, and yet most writers are largely unaware of it. As I’ve already mentioned, plot comes largely from reveals. To get reveals, you have to hide the ways the opponent attacks the hero. So you want to devise a detailed plan for the opponent with as many hidden attacks as possible. Each of these hidden attacks, when sprung on the hero, is another reveal. KEY