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

by John Truby

Moonstruck: While her fiancé visits his mother in Italy, a woman falls in love with the man’s brother.

Casablanca: A tough American expatriate rediscovers an old flame only to give her up so t...

Star Wars: When a princess falls into mortal danger, a young man uses his skills as a fighter to save her and defeat the evil forces of a galactic empire.

First, Hollywood is in the business of selling movies worldwide, with a big chunk of the revenue coming the opening weekend.

So producers look for a premise that is “high concept”—meaning that the film can be reduced to a catchy one-line description that audiences will understand instantly and come rushing to the theater to see.

Second, your premise is your inspiration. It’s the “lightbulb” moment when you say, “Now that would make a terrific story,” and that excitement gives you the perseverance to...

This leads to another important point: for better or worse, the premise is also your prison. As soon as you decide to pursue one idea, there are potentially thousands of ideas that you won’t be writing about. So y...

One last reason you must have a good premise is that it’s the one decision on which every other decision you make during the writing process is based.

KEY POINT: Nine out of ten writers fail at the premise.

They don’t realize that the great value of a premise is that it allows you to explore the full story, and the many forms it might take, before you actually write it.

They also don’t know the inherent structural weakness found in any high-concept premise: it gives you only two or three scenes.

Only by knowing the full craft of storytelling can you overcome the limitations of the high concept and tell the whole story successfully.

The first technique for finding the gold in an idea is time. Take a lot of it at the beginning of the writing process.

The premise stage of the writing process is where you explore your story’s grand strategy—seeing the big picture and figuring out the story’s general shape and development.

You are putting out feelers in the dark, exploring possibilities to see what works and what doesn’t, what forms an organic whole and what falls apart.

That means you have to remain flexible, open to all possibilities. For the same reason, this is where using an organic creative method as your guide is most important.

In the weeks you take to explore your premise, use these steps to come up with a premise line you can turn into a great story.

Step 1: Write Something That May Change Your Life This is a very high standard, but it may be the most valuable piece of advice you’ll ever get as a writer.

Why? Because if a story is that important to you, it may be that important to a lot of people in the audience.

And when you’re done writing the story, no matter what else happens, you...

Simple: do some self-exploration, something most writers, incredibly enough, never do.

To explore yourself, to have a chance to write something that may change your life, you have to get some data on who you are.

First, write down your wish list, a list of everything you would like to see up on the screen, in a book, or at the theater. It’s what you are passionately interested in, and it’s what entertains you. You might jot down characters you have imagined, cool plot twists, or great lines of dialogue that have popped into your head. You might list themes that you care about or certain genres that always attract you.

The second exercise is to write a premise list. This is a list of every premise you’ve ever thought of. That might be five, twenty, fifty, or more.

The key requirement of the exercise is that you express each premise in one sentence. This forces you to be very clear about each idea. And it allows you to see all your premises together in one place.

Once you have completed both your wish list and your premise list, lay them out b...

As you study, key patterns will start to emerge about what you love. This, in the rawest form possible, is your vision.

Notice that these two exercises are designed to open you up and to integrate what is already deep within you.

Step 2: Look for What’s Possible One of the biggest reasons writers fail at the premise stage is that they don’t know how to spot their story’s true potential.

What you’re looking for here is where the idea might go, how it might blossom.

KEY POINT: Explore your options. The intent here is to brainstorm the many different paths the idea can take and then to choose the best one.

Some ideas generate certain expectations, things that must happen to satisfy the audience if this idea were to play out in a full story.

more valuable technique for seeing what’s possible in the idea is to ask yourself, “What if … ?” The “what if” question leads to two places: your story idea and your own mind.

helps you define what is allowed in the story world and what is not. It also helps you explore your mind as it plays in this make-believe landscape.

The more often you ask “What if … ?” the more fully you can inhabit this landscape, flesh out its details, and ma...

To understand this process better, let’s look at some stories that have already been written and play around with what the authors might have been thinking as they explored the deeper possibilities of their premise ideas.

WITNESS (by Earl W. Wallace & William Kelley, story by William Kelley, 1985)

A boy who witnesses a crime is a classic setup...

But what if you push the story much further, to explore v...

What if you show the two extremes of the use of force—violence and pacifism—by having the boy travel from the peaceful Amish world to the violent city? What if you then force a good man of violence, the cop hero, to enter the Amish world and fall in lo...

TOOTSIE (by Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal, story by Don McGuire an...

is the fun of seeing a man dressed as a woman.

And you know they will want to see this character in as many difficult situations as possible.

What if you play up the hero’s strategizing to show how men play the game o...

What if you heighten the pace and the plot by pushing the story toward farce, showing a lot of men and women chasing after each other at the same time?

CHINATOWN (by Robert Towne, 1974)

A man who investigates a murder in 1930s Los Angeles promises all the revelations, twists, and s...

But what if the crime just keeps getting bigger? What if the detective starts investigating the smallest “crime” possible, adultery, and ends up finding out th...

Then you could make the revelations bigger and bigger until you reveal to the audience the deepest, dar...

THE GODFATHER (novel by Mario Puzo, screenplay by Mario Puzo and Franc...