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

by John Truby

THE STING • Premise Two con artists swindle a rich man who killed one of their friends.

Designing Principle Tell the story of a sting in the form of a sting, and con both the ...

LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT • Premise A family deals with the mother’s addiction. • Designing Principle As a family moves from day into night, its members are conf...

MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS • Premise A young woman falls in love with the boy next door. • Designing Principle The growth of a family over the course of a year is ...

COPENHAGEN • Premise Three people tell conflicting versions of a meeting that changed the outcome of World War II. • Designing Principle Use the Heisenberg uncertainty principle from physics to explor...

A CHRISTMAS CAROL • Premise When three ghosts visit a stingy old man, he regains the spirit of Christmas. • Designing Principle Trace the rebirth of a man by forcing him to view his past, his present...

IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE • Premise When a man prepares to commit suicide, an angel shows him what the world would be had he never been born. • Designing Principle Express the power of the individual by showing what a tow...

CITIZEN KANE • Premise Tell the life story of a rich newspaper baron. • Designing Principle Use a number of storytellers to show ...

Step 5: Determine Your Best Character in the Idea Once you have a lock on the designing principle of your story, it’s time to focus on your hero.

KEY POINT: Always tell a story about your best character.

“Best” doesn’t mean “nicest.” It means “the most fascinating, challenging, and complex,” even if that character isn’t particularly likable.

The reason you want to tell a story about your best character is that this is where your interest, and the audience’s interest, will inevitably go. You always want this character driving the action.

Who do I love? You can find the answer by asking yourself a few more questions: Do I want to see him act? Do I love the way he thinks? Do I care about the challenges he has to overcome?

you can’t find a character you love implied in the story idea, move on to another idea.

If you are developing an idea that seems to have multiple main characters, you will have as many story lines as main characters, and so you must find the best character for each story line.

Step 6: Get a Sense of the Central Conflict

Once you have an idea of who will drive the story, you want to figure out what your story is about at the most essential level.

That means determining the central conflic...

To figure out the central conflict, ask yourself “Who fights whom over what?” and answer the qu...

The answer to that is what your story is really about, because all conflict in the story will essentiall...

But you need to keep this one-line statement of conflict, along with the designing principle, i...

Step 7: Get a Sense of the Single Cause-and-Effect Pathway

Every good, organic story has a single cause-and-effect pathway: A leads to B, which leads to C, and so on all the way to Z.

This is the spine of the story, and if you don’t have a spine or you have too many spines, your story will fall apart (we’ll talk abo...

Let’s say you came up with this premise: A man falls in love and fights his brother...

But when you’ve written only one sentence, you can make a simple change and turn a split premise into a single line, such as this: Through the love of a good woman, a man defeats his brother for control of a winery.

“What is my hero’s basic action?”

But there should be one action that is most important, that unifies every other action the hero takes.

That action is the cause-and-...

For example, let’s go back to the one-line premise for Star Wars: When a princess falls into mortal danger, a young man uses his skills as a fighter to save her and...

In forcing ourselves to describe Star Wars in a single line, we see that the one action that unites all the myriad actions of that film is “uses his skills as a fighter.”

The youngest son of a Mafia family takes revenge on the men who shot his father and becomes the new Godfather.

Of all the actions Michael takes in that story, the one action that connects them all, the basic action, is that he takes revenge.

KEY POINT: If you are developing a premise with many main characters, each story line must have a single cause-and-effect path. And all the story lines should come together to form a larger, all-encompassing spine.

Step 8: Determine Your Hero’s Possible Character Change

After the designing principle, the most important thing to glean from your premise line is the fundamental character change of your hero.

This is what gives the audience the deepest satisfaction no matter what form the story takes, even when the character change...

Character change is what your hero experiences by going th...

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.

In the vast majority of stories, a character with weaknesses struggles to achieve something and ends up changed (positively or negatively) as a result.

The simple logic of a story works like this: How does the act of struggling to do the basic action (A) lead the ...

A character with certain weaknesses, when being put through the wringer of a particular struggle, is forged an...

KEY POINT: The basic action should be the one action best able to force the character to deal with his weaknesses and change.

Human growth is very elusive, but it is real, and it is what you, the writer, must express above everything else (or else show why it doesn’t occur).

The key to doing this is to start with the basic action and then go to the opposites of that action.

This will tell you who your hero is at the beginning of the story (his weaknesses) and who he is at ...

Write your simple premise line. (Be open to modifying this premise line once you discover the character change.) 2. Determine the basic action of your hero over the course of the story. 3. Come up with the opposites of A (the basic action) for both W (the hero’s weaknesses, psychological and moral) and C (changed person).

Going to the opposites of the basic action is crucial because that’s the only way that change can occur.

If your hero’s weaknesses are similar to the basic action he will take during the story, he will simply deepen those...

KEY POINT: Write down a number of possible options for the hero’s weaknesses and change.