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

by John Truby

A story about a Mafia family promises ruthless killers ...

But what if you make the head of the family much bigger, make him a ki...

What if he is the head of the dark side of America, just as powerful in the underworld as the pres...

Because this man is a king, you could create grand tragedy, a Shakespearean fall and rise where one king dies and another takes his place. What if you turn a s...

MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (novel by Agatha Chr...

A man killed in a train compartment right next door to where a brilliant detective is sleeping promises to b...

What if you want to show the ultimate poetic justice? What if the murdered man deserves to die, and a natural jury of twelve men and women serve...

BIG (by Gary Ross & Anne Spie...

boy who suddenly wakes up to find he is a full-grown man promises to be ...

And what if the story isn’t just about a boy getting big physically but one that shows the ideal blend of man and boy for living a happy adult life?

But each story has its own unique set of rules, or challenges, as well.

These problems are signposts for finding your true story.

You must confront these problems head-on and solve them if you are to execute your story well.

The trick is to learn how to spot inherent problems right at the premise line.

Here are just a few of the challenges and problems inherent to the following story ideas.

STAR WARS (by George Lucas, 1977) In any epic, but especially a space epic like Star Wars, you must introduce a wide range of characters quickly and then keep them interacting over vast space and time.

You must make the futuristic story believable and recognizable in the present. And you must find a way to create character change in a hero ...

Problems include creating a mentally challenged hero who is able to drive the plot, have believably deep insights, and experience character change while balancing whimsy with genuine sentiment.

The main challenge for Toni Morrison is to write a tale of slavery in which the hero is not portrayed as a victim.

JAWS (novel by Peter Benchley, screenplay by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb, 1975)

Writing a “realistic” horror story—in which characters fight one of man’s natural predators—poses many problems:

ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN (by Mark Twain, 1885)

The main challenge facing the writer of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is huge: How do you show the moral—or more precisely, immoral—fabric of an entire nation in fictional terms?

using a boy to drive the action; maintaining story momentum and strong opposition in a traveling, episodic structure; and believably showing a simple and not entire...

Fitzgerald’s challenge is to show the American dream corrupted and reduced to a competition for fame and money.

He must create narrative drive when the hero is someone else’s helper, make the audience care about shallow people, and somehow turn a small love story into a metaphor for America.

The central challenge for Arthur Miller is to turn the life of a small man into a grand tragedy.

Given the problems and the promises inherent in your idea, you must now come up with an overall strategy for how you will tell your story.

The designing principle helps you extend the premise into deep structure.

KEY POINT: The designing principle is what organizes the story as a whole. It is the internal logic of the story, what makes the parts hang together organically so that the story becomes greater than the sum of its parts. It is what makes the story original.

And it is the single most important factor in making your story original and effective.

Sometimes this principle is a symbol or a metaphor (known as the central symbol, the grand metaphor, or the root metaphor).

The designing principle is difficult to see. And in truth, most stories don’t have one.

Designing principle = story process + original execution

If you were really good, you might come up with this designing principle (for The Godfather):

Use the classic fairy-tale strategy of showing how the youngest of three sons becomes the new “king.”

KEY POINT: Find the designing principle, and stick to it. Be diligent in discovering this principle, and never take your eye off it during the long writing process.

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.

Don’t make the mistake most writers make at this point.

Instead of coming up with a unique designing principle, they pick a genre and impose it on the premise and then force the story to hit the beats (events) typical of that genre.

You find the designing principle by teasing it out of the simple one-line prem...

There are many possible designing principles or forms that you can glean from your premise and by which you can develop your story.

One way of coming up with a designing principle is to use a journey or similar traveling metaphor.

Huck Finn’s raft trip down the Mississippi River with Jim, Marlow’s boat trip up the river into the “heart of darkness,” Leopold Bloom’s travels through Dublin in Ulysses, Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole into the upside-down world of Wonderland—each of these uses a traveling metaphor to organize the deeper process of the story.

Sometimes a single symbol can serve as the designing principle, as with the red letter A in The Scarlet Letter, the island in The Tempest, the whale in Moby-Dick, or the mountain in The Magic Mountain.

Other designing principles include units of time (day, night, four seasons), the unique use of a storyteller, or a special way the story unfolds.

MOSES, IN THE BOOK OF EXODUS • Premise When an Egyptian prince discovers that he is a Hebrew, he leads his people out of slavery. • Designing Principle A man who does not know who he is struggles to lead his people to freedom and receives the new moral laws that will define him and his people.

ULYSSES • Premise Track a day in the life of a common man in Dublin. • Designing Principle In a modern odyssey through the city, over the course of a single day, one man finds a father and the other man finds a son.

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.