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

by John Truby

Good storytelling doesn’t just tell audiences what happened in a life. It gives them the experience of that life.

The dramatic code, embedded deep in the human psyche, is an artistic description of how a person can grow or evolve.

The genres that highlight taking action the most are myth and its later version, the action form. The genres that highlight learning the most are the detective story and the multiperspective drama.

The designing principle is abstract; it is the deeper process going on in the story, told in an original way. Stated in one line: Designing principle = story process + original execution

Premise When an actor can’t get work, he disguises himself as a woman and gets a role in a TV series, only to fall in love with one of the female members of the cast. • Designing Principle Force a male chauvinist to live as a woman.

“What is the most important thing they are fighting about?” That must be the focus of your story.

The moment of revelation should have these qualities: • It should be sudden, so that it has maximum dramatic force for the hero and the audience. • It should create a burst of emotion for the audience as they share the realization with the hero. • It should be new information for the hero: he must see, for the first time, that he has been living a lie about himself and that he has hurt others. • It should trigger the hero to take new moral action immediately, proving that the revelation is real and has profoundly changed him. The setup to the revelation should have these qualities: • The hero must be a thinking person, someone who is capable of seeing the truth and knowing right action. • The hero must be hiding something from himself. • This lie or delusion must be hurting the hero in a very real way.

The argument between hero and opponent is not between good and evil but between two characters who have weaknesses and needs.

The world should embody, highlight, or accentuate your hero’s weakness or draw it out in its worst form.

One key difference between science fiction and historical fiction is that stories set in the future highlight not so much values as the forces and choices that face us today and the consequences if we fail to choose wisely.

A ritual is a philosophy that has been translated into a set of actions that are repeated at specific intervals.

The symbol web shows a deeper reality about how the world works by referring objects, people, and actions to other objects, people, and actions.

Some writers use this combination—someone speaking personally to the audience and telling the story from memory—to fool them into thinking that what they are about to hear is more, not less, truthful.

An all-knowing storyteller has no dramatic interest in the present. He already knows everything that happened, so he becomes a dead frame.

scene is generally one action in one time and place. It is the basic unit of what actually happens in the story, right now, as the audience experiences it.

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. Your story may have subplots, or subsections, that when woven together create the plot. If you have more than one subplot or subsection, label each scene with a plotline and subsection number. This will allow you to look at the scenes of each subplot as a separate unit and make sure each subplot builds properly.

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.