Renowned Storytelling Coach Shares 22 Steps to Writing Compelling Stories — The Anatomy of Story by John Truby

Can you boil everything needed to write a good story into 22 steps?

Author John Truby claims to be able to do so.

I’m not sure I fully agree, but I have definitely given this book a fair hearing, taking detailed notes (and commentary) on all 11 chapters.

Storytelling is an art and a craft, and as the quote attributed to Somerset Maugham goes:

“There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

For certain writers, Truby’s analysis and advice (on creating a character web, designing an organic plot, and drafting a functioning scene weave, among other tips) might come close to helping you discover those rules for your own story.

But the only way to find out is to see for yourself…

In this article, we’re going to deep dive into the book’s content, not only looking at the ideas, but — as brilliant writers — checking out

How those ideas are presented in written format,
What we can learn from the book as writers and human beings,
And what action steps to take once we’ve digested the ideas in this book.

Ready to get started?

Who this book is for: Aspiring and experienced storytellers and writers who are interested in a well-known screenwriting consultant’s take on telling stories, to possibly find a few tips or tools to add to their creative toolbox.

Scylighter rating: 3.33/6 ⭐s (explanation of ratings at the end)

Best Ideas From This Book

These are the ideas I personally found most important and useful:

“No individual element” in your story will work unless you create it and define it in relation to all the other elements.” (Ch. 1)
“What you choose to write about is far more important than any decision you make about how to write it…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’ve changed your life.” (Ch. 2)
“Take time to separate the reveals from the rest of the plot and look at them as one unit.” (Ch. 8)
“The juxtaposition of two scenes can be more important than what happens in any individual scene.” (Ch. 9)

Join our merry band of Brilliant Writers for more book dives like this!

DETAILED BOOK NOTES

Chapter 1 — Story Space, Story Time

In This Chapter

Why the old terms like “rising action” and “three act structure” are useless for real story-building.
The goals and roadmap of this book — to show readers an organic writing process to create stories that help you succeed no matter what genre.
The definition of a story, and “the dramatic code.”
5 natural ways stories connect, based on our natural world.

Truby begins by saying that anyone can tell a story, but not everyone can tell a GREAT story.

“For one thing, showing the how and why of human life is a monumental job.”

(Yep, that’s the thing about stories. They don’t focus on the WHAT questions, but on the WHY, especially. They go a layer deeper)

Truby says:

“I want to be specific about the obstacles of story technique because that’s the only way a writer can hope to overcome them.”

Because, he says, the popular terms like “rising action” “climax” etc., are super old and super vague and super useless. In other words, “they have no practical value for storytellers.”

In fact, Truby says, the real problem lies even deeper than vague terms. Most people don’t have good “story technique” because they don’t even know “what story is and how it works.”

The famous three-act structure, for instance, he calls “hopelessly simplistic and in many ways just plain wrong” because it “promotes a view of story that is mechanical.”

Three-act structure, Truby says, “is a mechanical device superimposed on the story and has nothing to do with its internal logic”

(This is reminding me a lot of Lisa Cron’s Story Genius. Also, of the idea of musical structure like sonata form, etc.

In music history class we learned that understanding of musical structure was often something that came AFTER the composers wrote what sounded good to them, and then in retrospect composers and theorists figured out certain patterns that contributed to why the music sounded good)

The first problem with a mechanical view of story, Truby says, is that it leads to “episodic storytelling” a collection of parts that don’t integrate together well.

The next problem is that a mechanical view of story leads to use of a mechanical writing process.

So Truby wrote this book to show his readers a “better way” by “explain[ing] how a great story works, along with the techniques needed to create one.”

He acknowledges that some people claim great storytelling is impossible to teach, but he disagrees.

(This is interesting. I have considered this idea myself, I think in the end it’s a mix of both. You can teach certain aspects of storytelling that are fundamental to all good stories, but how well a writer takes those tools and “run with them” is probably something that can’t be taught. There are only a few Shakespeares, Jane Austens, Mark Twains, and so on in world history, after all)

Truby lists 3 goals for the book:

Show that great story is organic, more body than machine
Show that storytelling is a craft with “precise techniques that will help you be successful, regardless of the medium or genre you choose”
Show you an organic writing process (where characters and plot grow naturally out of your original idea)

“You construct a story from hundreds, even thousands, of elements using a vast array of techniques…you have to master this technique to such a high degree that your characters seem to be acting on their own…even though you are the one making them act that way.”

Then Truby compares writers to high performing athletes:

We storytellers are a lot like athletes. A great athlete makes everything look easy…But in fact he has so mastered the techniques of his sport that his technique has simply disappeared from view, and the audience sees only beauty.”

THE TELLER AND THE LISTENER

Truby starts this subsection in the chapter with a one-line definition of story:

“A speaker tells a listener what someone did to get what he wanted and why.”

He mentions how important that the storyteller is one who plays, since stories are “verbal games the author plays with the audience.”

But what separates good storytelling from the other stuff?

Good storytelling doesn’t just tell people what happened, but gives them an experience of the happening, making the audience feel like they lived that life.

“Stories are really giving the audience a form of knowledge — emotional knowledge — or what used to be known as wisdom, but they do it in a playful, entertaining way.”

How is storytelling a game?

Well, the storyteller creates something like a puzzle about his characters by revealing and withholding certain information, and then the audience’s job is to figure out what is going on, which draws them into the story.

Both of these aspects of story are what make storytelling so attractive to humans:

Living someone else’s life
Figuring out a puzzle

The best stories, Truby argues, includes both of these concepts, just to different degrees.

THE STORY

Now, Truby defines story as “a form of communication that expresses the dramatic code.”

But what the hey is a “dramatic code”?

It is, according to Truby, “an artistic description of how a person can grow or evolve.”

And, in contrast to Descarte’s famous quote, in the story world, the line should be: “I want, therefore I am.” In other words:

“A story tracks what a person wants, what he’ll do to get it, and what costs he’ll have to pay along the way.”

Stories are motivated by characters’ desires. Someone has to want something enough to pursue it for the story to come alive.

And as the character learns new things, it changes his actions, and the story continues. Or when the character is impeded, it forces him to struggle, which causes him to change, and so the story continues.

There are different kinds of changes storytellers can show, from grand sweeping birth-to-death tales to smaller, more moment-of-decision tales.

Why does the dramatic code work?

Truby says: “The dramatic code expresses the idea that human beings can become a better version of themselves, psychologically and morally. And that’s why people love it.”

At the end of this section, Truby includes a KEY POINT in a callout box, saying that “The story world isn’t a copy of life as it is. It’s life as human beings imagine it could be.”

THE STORY BODY

Now Truby turns to the idea that story is an organic thing, like the human body which is made of many complex interdependent systems.

If story is like a body, then the theme (moral argument), Truby says, is like the brain. In fact, he sets out these metaphors:

Theme/moral argument = brain
Character = heart/circulatory system
Revelations = nervous system
Structure = skeleton
Scenes = skin

Here, he inserts another KEY POINT callout box: “Each subsystem of the story consists of a web of elements that help define and differentiate the other elements.”

In other words, Truby summarizes, no “individual element” in your story (like character, for example) will work unless you “create it and define it in relation to all the other elements.”

(This is true. And side note, this is one of the strongest logical arguments against macroevolution. Because the different systems in a body rely on each other for their existence and survival, it’s impossible for them to have evolved separately one by one. In the same way, stories have to be conceptualized with everything at once, rather than focusing only on character and ignoring theme, etc.)

STORY MOVEMENT

Now, how do the different elements in a story connect?

Here Truby gives some naturally-occurring ways that things connect in our physical world, including:

Linear
Meandering
Spiral
Branching
Explosive

And then he applies it to stories:

Linear Stories: track a single MC from start to end, historically. Most Hollywood films are like this.
Meandering Stories: “follow a winding path without apparent direction” for example, The Odyssey, Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn, David Copperfield. The hero isn’t single-mindedly pursuing one overarching desire, instead “he covers a great deal of territory in a haphazard way” and interacts with many different other characters.
Spiral Stories: circle inward toward the center, like Vertigo, Memento, The Conversation, where a character keeps returning to an event or memory, going deeper with each repeat.
Branching Stories: have a few central points split into smaller parts, like in trees. See Gulliver’s Travels, It’s a Wonderful Life, or multiple-hero stories like Nashville
Explosive Stories: have multiple paths that extend simultaneously, as in dandelions or volcanoes. You can’t really do truly explosive stories but you can create the appearance of it with crosscuts. See The Canterbury Tales, Pulp Fiction, Nashville, LA Confidential.

WRITING YOUR STORY

“Most writers don’t use the best process for creating a story. They use the easiest one.”

Which is why, in this section, Truby he says his goal is to teach his readers a writing process that will allow you to “construct your story from the inside out,” meaning:

Making the story personal and unique to you
Finding/developing the original within your story

So in the rest of this book, Truby will be following this roadmap:

Begin with the premise — your story boiled down to one sentence.
Intro to the Seven Key Story Structure steps
Character creation
Fleshing out your theme/moral argument
Create your story world
Come up with your web of symbols
Plot based on story form, using 22 story structure steps
A list of every scene in the story
Write the story

And that wraps up this chapter.

Quotes & Comments

First line(s): Everyone can tell a story. We do it every day.

Last line(s): As you watch your story grow before your eyes, I can promise you one thing: you will enjoy the creation. So let’s begin.

Truby’s comparison of writers to athletes was really interesting for me. This is so true. And similar to high performing musicians as well. In fact, I think performing musicians are basically athletes, with a heavier emphasis on the art than the physicality of their practice. It’s interesting to see Truby include this comparison here.
I’m not sure his callout boxes highlight the most important ideas in the section. Some of them are not the most helpful, actually.
But I do like how he listed out the exact things he’s planning to cover in the rest of the book, in chronological order (I personally prefer numbering, not just bulleting them, which is what he did in the book)

Chapter 2 — Premise

In This Chapter

What a story premise is and what it should contain.
10 steps and 2 exercises to come up with your premise.
Defining the designing principle and why it’s useful.

Truby begins with a commentary on how Michael Crichton characters aren’t deep or brilliant, but “[Crichton] just happens to be the best premise writer in Hollywood,” which is why he succeeds.

WHAT IS THE PREMISE?

“The premise is your story stated in one sentence.”

And what should it contain?

An action kicker-off-er, and some “sense of the main character.”

Here, Truby gives a few examples, for example — Casablanca: A tough American expatriate rediscovers an old flame only to give her up so that he can fight the Nazis.

Truby says premises matter because:

Hollywood producers tend to look for “high concept” premises, meaning stories with a catchy one-line description that people can instantly understand and want to see.
Premises can inspire you, since they’re based on a “lightbulb” moment.
It’s the decision upon which all other decisions are made.

But, he warns, “the premise is also your prison” because as soon as you nail down one idea, you have to ignore the millions of other ideas you WON’T be writing.

Here, Truby throws in a callout box Key Point:

“What you choose to write about is far more important than any decision you make about how to write it.”

Then he emphasizes the importance of the premise:

“If you fail at the premise, nothing else will help. If a building’s foundation is flawed, no amount of work on the floors above will make the building stable.”

And here’s another Key Point:

“Nine out of ten writers fail at the premise.”

(I have to admit, I’m wondering if this is based on research, anecdotal evidence, or on the idea of “87.56% of statistics are made up”)

So how DO you come up with a good premise, then?

Truby recommends that you take your time — weeks of thinking is a good idea.

But the problem is that high concept premises only produce a couple or so scenes, but the average film has 40–70 scenes, and novels anywhere from 80 up to 210 scenes or so.

This stage is where you “explore your story’s grand strategy,” so you need to stay flexible and open to possibilities.

DEVELOPING YOUR PREMISE

At this point, Truby gives numbered steps on what to do:

Step 1: Write Something that May Change Your Life
Step 2: Look for What’s Possible
Step 3: Identify the Story Challenges and Problems
Step 4: Find the Designing Principle
Step 5: Determine Your Best Character in the Idea
Step 6: Get a Sense of the Central Conflict
Step 7: Get a Sense of the Single Cause-and-Effect Pathway
Step 8: Determine Your Hero’s Possible Character Change
Step 9: Figure Out the Hero’s Possible Moral Choice
Step 10: Gauge the Audience Appeal

…and here’s a breakdown:

Step 1: Write Something that May Change Your Life

This step “may be the most valuable piece of advice you’ll ever get as a writer” says Truby. 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’ve changed your life.”

And how do you do this? Truby recommends doing some “self-exploration, something most writers, incredibly enough, never do.”

(Hmm…I’m not sure where they got this idea that writers don’t do self-exploration. In my experience, they tend to err on the side of over-rumination. Maybe TRUTHFUL self-exploration? But that’s difficult for everyone, not just writers)

In other words, Truby recommends coming up with your own story rather than copy-pasting someone else’s concept. And for this, he recommends two exercises:

Write down your “wish list” of everything you’d love to see on screen or in a book
Write a list of one-sentence premises, every premise you’ve ever thought of, so you can see them all in one place.

Now, take both lists and “study them. Look for core elements that repeat themselves on both lists.”

“This, in the rawest form possible, is your vision. It’s who you are, as a writer and as a human being, on paper in front of you. Go back to it often.”

(Interesting. This is a pretty grand promise, but possibly true. Because what attracts you to a story, besides the flashy stuff like car chases or whatever for some, or romances for others, is probably often worldview-deep themes like “love conquers all” or “freedom” etc.)

Step 2: Look for What’s Possible

Here, Truby says on major reason writers fail at this first stage is “they don’t know how to spot their story’s true potential.”

So, he warns readers not to run with any one possibility immediately, but to take time to “explore your options.”

In the KEY POINT, Truby says: “The intent here is to brainstorm the many different paths the idea can take and then to choose the best one.”

Look at your idea and see what kind of promises are generated naturally from them. Ask yourself “what if?” Don’t censor yourself at this point. Stupid ideas can lead to “creative breakthroughs.”

Here, Truby takes a few published stories and hypothesizes what their authors might have been thinking while brainstorming them. Including The Godfather, Murder on the Orient Express, and so on.

For Murder on the Orient Express, Truby writes:

“A man killed in a train compartment right next door to where a brilliant detective is sleeping…But 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 serves as both his judge and his executioner?

Step 3: Identify the Story Challenges and Problems

Each story has different kinds of inherent problems “embedded in the idea,” and you need to identify and address the problems early on.

Here, Truby gives some examples from Star Wars, Forrest Gump, Jaws, The Great Gatsby, etc.

For example, for Star Wars, some inherent problems are:

Need to introduce a wide range of characters quickly and keep them interacting “over vast space and time”
Make this futuristic story believable
Create character change in a hero who is already morally good from the start.

Step 4: Find the Designing Principle

At this point, says Truby, you need “an overall strategy for how you will tell your story.” This is your Designing Principle.

It “helps you extend the premise into deep structure.”

In a Key Point, Truby says this 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.”

Sometimes, Truby says, this designing principle is a central symbol or grand metaphor, but it can be bigger than that.

Actually, Truby says that most (standard, generic) stories don’t have a designing principle. According to Truby, all stories have a premise, but only good stories have a designing premise.

He defines it with this word equation:

Designing principle = story process + original execution.

(It sounds like he’s saying the premise is the what, the designing principle is the how)

He gives an example from The Godfather, saying that hypothetically, the writers of that movie wanted to show the “intimate workings of the Mafia in America,” which they did using the designing principle of:

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

This, Truby says, is what makes this story different from all other stories.

Here he puts in the Key Point: “Find the designing principle, and stick to it…never take your eye off it during the long writing process.”

He gives a few other examples of the designing principle, suggesting experimenting with a “journey or similar traveling metaphor” or saying that the red letter A in The Scarlet Letter, or the whale in Moby-Dick are designing principles.

Then he throws in a few more designing principles like

units of time (day/night, four seasons)
unique use of a storyteller
special way the story unfolds

(This I would say is the weakest part of the book so far. This concept of a designing principle is not clear at all)

Truby attempts to give more examples of premises and designing principles from a variety of stories and so ends his explanation of step 4.

Step 5: Determine Your Best Character in the Idea

Here, the Key Point says: “always tell a story about your best character.”

And “best” means the most fascinating / complex, NOT the most likable. This character should be the one driving the action.

It should be a character you love, Truby says. Or else, move on to another idea.

Step 6: Get a Sense of the Central Conflict

Now, “you want to figure out what your story is about at the most essential level,” aka the central conflict. How do you do this? Answer this question in one line:

“Who fights whom over what?”

But more on this in later chapters.

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

Truby writes:

“Every good, organic story has a single cause-and-effect pathway: A leads to B…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.”

As an example, Truby explains that this is a split premise:

“A man falls in love and fights his brother for control of winery”

Whereas this helps you turn the previous split premise into a single line:

“Through the love of a good woman, a man defeats his brother for control of a winery.”

The key to discovering your cause-and-effect pathway is to answer the question: “What is my hero’s basic action?” This is the one action the character does that “unifies every other action [he] takes.”

For example:

In Star Wars, Luke’s main action is “using his skills as a fighter.”
In The Godfather, Michael’s main action is “taking revenge.”

Here, Truby includes a Key Point to tell readers that if you’ve got multiple main characters (like in Canterbury Tales), each story line should have one single cause-and-effect path, and those paths should come together into one bigger spine.

Step 8: Determine Your Hero’s Possible Character Change

The second most important thing you need from your premise, aside from the designing principle, is the “fundamental character change of your hero.”

Truby represents this as an equation:

W x A = C

W = the (psychological and moral) weakness
A = the struggle to accomplish the basic action in the middle of the story
C = the changed person

(I’m not sure it was a good idea to represent this concept as a multiplication problem)

Here, Truby puts a callout box with a Key Point about the “basic action,” saying that it “should be the one action best able to force the character to deal with his weaknesses and change.”

(IMHO, this key point should have been included in the previous section, which gives examples of basic actions, not here, where we’ve moved on to another concept)

Then Truby talks about using the opposite of the basic action to figure out the character’s weakness at the beginning of the story and how he changes by the end.

He gives an example, saying that if a story’s basic action is “to become an outlaw,” then you could start with a variety of different beginnings, like:

“An uptight, henpecked man gets involved with a gang of outlaws and gets a divorce.”
Or: “An uptight, haughty banker gets involved with outlaws and gives aid to the poor.”
Or: “A shy, timid man becomes involved with a gang of outlaws and gets drunk with fame.”

As a more concrete example, Truby uses The Godfather again, saying that since Michael’s basic action is “taking revenge,” then he can’t start out as a already-vengeful man. He has nothing to change to, then. So he should start out as the opposite of vengeful.

Step 9: Figure Out the Hero’s Possible Moral Choice

“The central theme of a story is often crystallized by a moral choice the hero must make, typically near the end of the story. Theme is your view of the proper way to act in the world. It is your moral vision and it is one of the main reasons you are writing your story.”

(I heartily agree with this statement. I think all artists have something they want to say about how the world is and how it ought to be, and same with people. This is the part that I don’t often hear people talking about, but every story really DOES have a moral argument, a worldview that it is trying to persuade its audience of.)

Here, Truby warns writers against “giving their hero a fake (moral) choice,” which is a choice between the positive and negative, like “choose between going to prison and winning the girl.”

Anyone with a brain knows what to choose in that case.

Here’s a Key Point: “To be a true choice, your hero must either select one of two positive outcomes or…avoid one of two negative outcomes.”

You should make the choices “as equal as possible” for example, choosing between love and honor. This is the choice in A Farewell to Arms, in which the hero chooses love. Whereas in The Maltese Falcon, which has the same choice, the hero chooses honor.

Don’t worry about locking this in, though, you may change your idea by the time you’ve written the story. The idea is to just start the thinking process about this choice from the very beginning of your writing process.

(I like this. Keeping this crucial idea in mind without holding on to it too tightly)

Step 10: Gauge the Audience Appeal

“You should always write first for yourself; write what you care about. But you shouldn’t write only for yourself.”

(I like this quote from Truby. It’s quite true — ha! That qualifies as wordplay, doesn’t it? — but I think this is the accurate way to handle the tension between what resonates with you artistically, and what “sells” to put it simply. Start with what makes you excited, and then consider your potential audience.)

Truby argues that this is not an either-or problem. You can write things you care about AND write what will sell.

(This reminds me of the classic false dichotomy between science and faith. People have spent a lot of energy trying to convince others that the two are mutually exclusive, when actually, they’re metaphorically married to each other)

The point, Truby says, is:

“Your writing should mean a lot to you personally. But writing for an audience makes it a lot easier to do what you love.”

Now, at the end of the chapter, Truby gives a writing exercise, listing the steps he’s gone over so far:

Write down your one-sentence premise
Create your wish list and premise list
Look for possibilities in your premise
Come up with as many story challenges and problems that are unique to your premise
Come up with your designing principle
Pick your best character
Come up with your conflict
Identify your basic action
Figure out your possible character change
Come up with the moral choice
Ask if your idea has audience appeal

Then, to wrap up this chapter, he goes through each of these 11 steps with the story Tootsie.

Quotes & Comments

First line(s): Michael Crichton doesn’t have the deep human characters of a Chekhov of the brilliant plots of a Dickens. He just happens to be the best premise writer in Hollywood.

Last line(s): Moral Choice Michael sacrifices his lucrative acting job and apologizes to Julie for lying to her. [Author explicating Tootsie]

I think these 10 steps to come up with a premise is probably an effective idea for those who want to write a story but have no idea where to start.
The only thing is, I myself and some other writers I know usually DO have a place to start. A more-fully-fleshed out story idea that doesn’t need several of the steps in this list, except perhaps to double check if we’re on the right track.
That said, I like the idea of making the two lists of what you like to see in stories, and premise ideas, although I suspect the first list is more valuable (at least for me).
It’s a good idea to make conscious your subconscious preferences in stories, so that you can incorporate that into your story-writing.
The concept of the designing principle is still not very clear. And the examples he gives don’t help, although I’ve read this passage and its examples several times. This is a pretty major problem in this chapter and in this book.

Chapter 3 — The Seven Key Steps of Story Structure

In This Chapter

7 key structural ingredients in every successful story.
The difference between a psychological and moral need.

Truby states that there are 7 key structural ingredients that make every story successful. And by “structure,” he means “how stories develop over time.”

The 7 steps are:

Weakness and need
Desire
Opponent
Plan
Battle
Self-revelation
New equilibrium

…and they are “the foundation of your success as a storyteller because they are based on human action.”

In real life, Truby argues, people use these seven steps to solve problems. He then goes on to break down each of the steps.

1. WEAKNESS AND NEED

When the story starts, the hero has one or more “great weaknesses” that hold him back.

“Something is missing within him that is so profound, it is ruining his life…The need is what the hero must fulfill within himself in order to have a better life.”

(This is reminiscent of Lisa Cron’s Story Genius concept).

Truby underlines this step, saying it is the “wellspring of the story and sets up every other step.”

KEY #1 is that the hero is NOT aware of this need at the beginning of the story. “If he is already cognizant of what he needs, the story is over.” The hero is supposed to realie his need near the end of the story, during the self-revelation after going through pain (drama) or struggle (comedy).

KEY #2 is that the hero needs a MORAL need as well as a PSYCHOLOGICAL one.

“In average stories, the hero has only a psychological need…[which] involves overcoming a serious flaw that is hurting nobody but the hero.

“In better stories, the hero has a moral need in addition to a psychological need.”

What is a moral need? A flaw that causes the hero not to “act properly toward other people.” As Truby says, “A character with a moral need is always hurting others in some way.”

(That is a FASCINATING definition, and also resonates with reality. Which makes sense, because the best stories help people learn how to live better in the real world, so of course the best stories need to reflect the real world, and in the real world we all have moral weaknesses.)

Why do heroes need a moral need? To keep them from being too perfect (and therefore unrealistic) or too much a victim. Truby calls these the “kiss of death in storytelling.”

“Remember the simple rule of thumb: to have a moral need, the character must be hurting at least one other person at the beginning of the story.”

Truby suggests 2 ways to come up with the right moral need for your hero:

Connect it to the psychological weakness (figure out what immoral actions may naturally come out of a psychological weakness)
Turn a strength into a weakness (push a virtue so far it becomes oppressive, or find the negative version of a value that the hero believes in)

(It would be really helpful if Truby gave an example or a few here to illustrate these two methods, but he does not)

Next.

You need a problem. It should be present from page one of your story, even if it’s not as important as the weakness and the need.

“All good stories begin [with] the hero already in trouble.” The hero knows there’s a crisis, but not how to solve it.

KEY: Keep the problem simple and specific.

“Crisis defines a character very quickly. It should be an outside manifestation of the hero’s weakness.”

2. DESIRE

This is the character’s goal. It’s what makes stories interesting. Desire is “the driving force in the story” and is “intimately connected to need.”

Truby warns writers not to confuse need and desire or think of them as one step. They are separate.

“Need has to do with overcoming a weakness within the character…Desire is a goal outside the character.”

And how does the audience see need and desire?

Need: The audience sees how the hero must change to have a better life. This is under the surface.
Desire: Gives the audience something to want along with the hero. This is on the surface.

For example, in “Saving Private Ryan,” the hero, John Miller’s DESIRE is to find Private Ryan and bring him back alive. His NEED is to do his duty in spite of his fear (psychological and moral).

KEY: Your hero’s desire is what he wants IN THE STORY, not what he wants in life.

Truby also warns writers that you can’t skip step 1 and just start with step 2, desire. Because without the weakness-and-need step, you “kill the payoff” of the ending. So never skip step 1.

3. OPPONENT

Also known as the antagonist, the opponent is NOT necessarily evil. You need to look at the opponent in terms of his function in the structure of the story.

“A true opponent not only wants to prevent the hero from achieving his desire but is competing with the hero for the same goal.”

(This is an interesting statement. Let’s see how Truby backs it up…)

If you think of your opponent in these terms, you organically “link this step to your hero’s desire.”

“It is only by competing for the same goal that the hero and the opponent are forced to come into direct conflict and to do so again and again throughout the story.”

In many stories, it doesn’t APPEAR that the hero and opponent want the same thing, but dig a little deeper and you will see that they do. In detective fiction, for example, it looks like the hero wants to catch the killer, who wants to escape. But in reality, they’re “fighting over which version of reality everyone will believe.”

“The trick to creating an opponent who wants the same goal as the hero is to find the deepest level of conflict between them…’What is the most important thing they are fighting about?’ That must be the focus of your story.”

KEY: Start with your hero’s specific goal. whoever wants to keep him from getting that is an opponent.

And also note that a hero’s opponent is NOT himself. When people talk about characters fighting themselves, they’re talking about the weakness.

So here, Truby gives a few opponent examples:

In “The Godfather,” Michael’s main opponent is Barzini. They’re competing over the survival of the Corleone family and who will control crime in New York.
In “Star Wars,” Luke’s opponent is Darth Vader, they’re competing over who controls the universe — Empire or Republic?

4. PLAN

The plan is “the set of guidelines, or strategies, the hero will use to overcome the opponent and reach the goal.”

The plan is “organically linked to both desire and the opponent. The plan should always be specifically focused toward defeating the opponent and reaching the goal.”

For example, in “Hamlet,” Hamlet’s plan is to put on a play mimicking the murder of his father to prove the current king’s guilt.

5. BATTLE

In the middle of the story, the hero and opponent “engage in a punch-counterpunch confrontation as each tries to win the goal.”

And the battle is the FINAL conflict that determines who wins. It can be a conflict of either words or violence.

Examples:

The Odyssey: Odysseus kills his wife’s suitors.
The Verdict: Frank defeats the opponent in the courtroom using “brilliant, persuasive” words.

6. SELF-REVELATION

The battle should be “intense and painful” for the hero, a “crucible” that “causes the hero to have a major revelation about who he really is.”

“Much of the quality of your story is based on the quality of this self-revelation.”

A good revelation comes in two steps, like the need: psychological and moral.

Psychological revelations make the hero “strip away the facade” and “see himself honestly for the first time.” Which is NOT “passive or easy” task. It should be active, difficult, and courageous.

And don’t have your hero announce what he’s learned, or you’ll sound preachy. Here are some examples of a revelation:

Casablanca: Rick tosses his cynicism, takes back his idealism, and sacrifices his love for Ilsa to be a freedom fighter.
Dances With Wolves: Dunbar finds a reason to live and a new way of manhood through his wife and new Lakota Sioux family.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Huck realizes he’s wrong for seeing Jim as less than human and decides not to tell Jim’s owner where Jim is.

“If you’ve given your hero a moral need, his self-revelation should be moral as well. The hero doesn’t just see himself in a new light; he has an insight about the proper way to act toward others.”

The revelation can be a negative one, too, as in “Chinatown,” where hero Jake comes to believe that his life is useless and destructive because he has again hurt someone he loved and was unable to protect Evelyn from death.

This self-revelation step is closely connected to need. It’s the end of your character’s arc, the point where your hero grows and is enabled to lead a better life, unless, as Truby points out, “the knowledge is so painful it destroys him.”

7. NEW EQUILIBRIUM

Now, everything has returned to normal, “all desire is gone,” except for “one major difference. The hero has moved to a higher or lower level as a result of going through his crucible.”

AKA, your hero is permanently and fundamentally changed for good or ill through either a positive or negative revelation. Examples:

Die Hard: John’s defeated the bad guys, saved his wife, reaffirmed their love.
Pretty Woman: Vivian’s left prostitution and is with the billionaire she loves.
The Silence of the Lambs: Clarice has brought Buffalo Bill to justice, become a great FBI agent, conquered her nightmares.
Oedipus the King: Oedipus blinds himself upon realizing he’s killed his father and slept with his mother.
Vertigo: The hero accidentally kills the woman he loves when trying to force her to confess to a murder.

HOW TO USE THE SEVEN STEPS — WRITING EXERCISE 2

Jot down story events in single sentences.
You want at least 5, but the more the better.
Your initial story ideas are “extremely valuable, even if none of them ends up in the final story.”
Organize the events in rough order, beginning to end, then study the Seven Steps and identify your seven structure steps.
Give your hero a psych+moral self-revelation and work backwards to figure out his psych+moral need for the beginning.
Then give your hero a problem, desire, opponent, plan, and battle/new equilibrium.

KEY: Start with the self-revelation and work backwards and figure out your hero’s need and desire.

As Truby says, working backwards is “one of the best techniques in fiction writing because it guarantees that your hero and your story are always heading toward the true endpoint of the structural journey…the self-revelation.”

(This “work backwards” idea is pretty common in story-craft advice. I think it’s pretty sound. It’s also sound advice for other things, like learning a new skill. You start with the skill you want to learn, the goal for which you want to learn it, and then you work backwards and figure out how to get there.

(Oftentimes, this requires a more experienced mentor or teacher to help you scaffold your learning, but in some cases, autodidacts can figure this out themselves. See Scott Young’s Ultralearning)

Here, Truby gives a breakdown of The Godfather using these 7 Steps:

Hero: Michael Corleone
Weakness: Michael is young, inexperienced, overconfident
Psychological need: Michael needs to overcome his self-righteousness and sense of superiority
Moral need: Michael has to avoid becoming ruthless like other Mafia bosses, while protecting his family
Problem: A rival gang shoots Michael’s dad, the family head
Desire: Michael wants revenge and to protect his family
Opponent: Barzini wants to bring the Corleone’s down and control crime in NY
Plan: Michael plans to kill the heads of the other families in one shot
Battle: Crosscut between Michael’s attending his nephew’s baptism and the killing of five Mafia heads.
Psychological self-realization: None. Michael is still superior and self-righteous.
Moral self-realization: None. Michael has become a ruthless killer. Instead, his wife has the revelation as she sees what Michael has become.
New Equilibrium: Michael is the new Godfather, but morally he has fallen into being a “devil.”

Quotes & Comments

First line(s): The Godfather is a long, complex novel and film.

Last line(s): New Equilibrium Michael has killed his enemies and “risen” to the position of Godfather. But morally, he has fallen and become the “devil.” This man who once wanted nothing to do with the violence and crime of his family is now its leader and will kill anyone who betrays him or gets in his way. [Author’s analysis of The Godfather]

This chapter is fairly straightforward. It’s similar to other things I’ve read before as in Lisa Cron’s Story Genius or Jennie Nash’s Blueprint for a Book, which remain my top two writing craft books, for now.
Having multiple examples from different stories is helpful. Truby though clearly likes The Godfather best, as he uses that story multiple times throughout this book, which is probably a good idea — that way you can go deep instead of wide.
But to show that your storytelling techniques truly are applicable to any story from any genre, it’s more than a good idea to include examples of these techniques displayed in stories from in various genres, so good for Truby for doing that here.

Chapter 4 — Character

In This Chapter

What is a character web, what’s it made of, and how does it help writers create organic characters.
Types of characters and their story functions (Hero, Opponent, Ally, Fake-Ally Opponent, etc).
Major character archetypes and their shadows.
4 steps to creating a compelling character.

Truby starts the story by citing the story Tootsie, and saying: “each character…is a unique version of the hero’s central moral problem.”

Then he says how writers usually get characters wrong: By “listing all the traits of the hero, tell a story about him, and then somehow make him change at the end.”

But, Truby says, that won’t work.

Instead, writers need to:

Look at ALL the characters “as part of an interconnected web” and distinguishing them by “comparing each to the others according to story function and archetype.”
Individualize each character based on theme and opposition
Build the hero step by step into a “multilayered, complex person that the audience cares about.”
Create the opponent in detail, because “this is the most important character after your hero and, in many ways, is the key to defining your hero.”
Use character techniques to build conflict over the course of the story.

CHARACTER WEB

“Every character must serve the purpose of the story, which is found in the story’s designing principle.”

These are the major kinds of characters and their story functions:

Hero: The one who has the central problem, drives the action, goes for the goal, has weaknesses that hold him back.
Opponent: The one who “most wants to keep the hero from achieving his desire.” You can have a primary, secondary, etc., opponent.
Ally: Hero’s helper, sounding board. May have the same goal as the hero, or another.
Fake-Ally Opponent: Appears to be the hero’s friend, but is actually an opponent. One of the most complex/fascinating characters, often ends up helping hero win.
Fake-Opponent Ally: Appears to be fighting hero but actually is a friend. Not as common or useful to the writer because he doesn’t create more conflict.
Subplot Character: Most misunderstood in fiction. Not merely “love interest in a detective story.” Subplots are for “contrast[ing] how a hero and second character deal with the same problem in slightly different ways.” Subplot characters highlight traits/dilemmas of hero. (See Laertes in Hamlet)

KEY: Subplot character is usually not the ally.

Now, Truby gives an example of all these characters from The Silence of the Lambs:

Hero: Clarice Starling
Main Opponent: Buffalo Bill, serial killer.
Second Opponent: Dr. Chilton, warden.
Fake-Ally Opponent: None
Ally: Jack, boss at FBI
Fake-Opponent Ally: Hannibal Lecter
Subplot Character: None

Now, what if you have two main characters, or seem to? This happens with love stories and buddy pictures (which Truby says is actually a combo of 3 genres — action, love, comedy).

In these types of dual-hero stories, here are the functions of the characters:

LOVE STORIES

Love stories’ main message is that “a person does not become a true individual by being alone…[but] by entering into a community of two.”

In a love story, although there are 2 characters, you really want to make one character more central than the other. That one will have the “main desire line.”

This makes the lover the Main Opponent (not the second hero). For an example, Truby cites Tootsie, a story about an actor who pretends to be a woman in order to win more roles, and runs into romantic problems.

Hero: Michael
Main Opponent: Julie
Second Opponent: Ron, the director
Third Opponent: John, TV doctor
Fourth Opponent: Les, Julie’s father
Fake-Ally Opponent: Sandy
Allies: George, Michael’s agent, Michael’s roommate Jeff
Fake-Opponent Ally: None
Subplot Characters: Ron, Sandy

BUDDY STORIES

Truby says the buddy story is as old as Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Like in love stories, one person should be more central in this pair. The buddy is “a kind of double of the hero, similar in important ways, but also different.”

In terms of structure, the buddy is both First Opponent (which usually means “good-natured bickering) and First Ally, not second hero.

The buddies meet opponents along the way who try to break them up, because there is a fundamental conflict between the buddies which creates ongoing opposition in a travel story.

As an example, Truby cites Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid:

Hero: Butch
Main Opponent: Sundance
Second Opponent: Railroad boss E.H. Harriman and his “hired guns”
Third Opponent: Bolivian cops and army
Fake-Ally Opponent: Harvey
Ally: Etta, Sundance’s girlfriend
Fake-Opponent Ally: Sheriff Ray
Subplot Character: None

MULTIPLE HEROES AND NARRATIVE DRIVE

What if you DO have multiple heroes?

This is the “simultaneous action” type of story. Instead of linearly following one hero, the story is comparing multiple heroes at the same time. The danger is that you lose forward narrative drive because you have too many heroes and stories going on.

“Even the most simultaneous story must have some linear quality, sequencing events in time.”

For this type of story to work, you have to “put each main character through all seven steps” or else they are not a main character/hero.

Note: The more heroes you have, the less narrative drive. Some tips for ameliorating this issue:

Have one character become more central than the others over time
Give all characters the same desire line
Make the hero of one story line the opponent in another
Make all characters examples of one single subject/theme
Reduce time
Put the characters in one location instead of lots of scattered ones

And so on. Truby cites a few examples of multiple hero stories to refer to, like The Canterbury Tales, Pulp Fiction, L.A. Confidential, etc.

Now, to make your storytelling tighter, cut extraneous characters. They create “episodic, inorganic stories.”

So when you create a character, ask yourself “Does this character serve an important function in the overall story”? If not, “if he only provides texture or color — you should consider cutting him entirely.”

CHARACTER WEB BY ARCHETYPE

What is an archetype? A fundamental psychological pattern in a person, “the roles a person may play in society, essential ways of interacting with others…[that] cross cultural boundaries and have universal appeal.”

Archetypes resonate with people because they’re easily recognizable, but they can also easily become stereotypes unless you add detail.

Truby cites Carl Jung as the one who started the concept of archetypes and in fiction, the most important concept is the “notion of a shadow…the negative tendency of the archetype, a psychological trap a person can fall into when playing that role.”

So what are the major archetypes and their shadows?

King or Father
Strength: Leads with wisdom, foresigh, resolve
Weakness: Can become oppressive, remove himself from emotion, become tyrannical
Ex: King Arthur, King Lear, Aragorn and Sauron, Agamemnon
Queen or Mother
Strength: Provides care and protection for child/people to grow
Weakness: Can be over-protective, controlling/tyrannical, use guilt/shame to keep child close
Ex: Hera, queens in Hamlet, Macbeth
Wise Old Man/Woman, Mentor/Teacher
Strength: Pass on knowledge/wisdom so people can live better
Weakness: Can force students to think his way or “speak for the glory of himself rather than the glory of his ideas.”
Ex: Yoda, Hannibal Lecter, Gandalf and Sarumon, Miss Havisham
Warrior
Strength: Practical enforcer of what’s right
Weakness: Can turn harsh (“kill or be killed”) and destructive of anything weak, turning into enforcer of the wrong
Ex: Achilles, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, King Arthur, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli
Magician/Shaman
Strength: Makes visible deeper reality, balance/control larger/hidden forces of natural world
Weakness: Can manipulate deeper reality to enslave others, destroy natural order
Ex: Macbeth, Merlin, Phantom of the Opera, Gandalf and Saruman, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot
Trickster
Strength: Uses confidence, tricker, way with words to get what he wants
Weakness: May become a selfish liar
Ex: Odysseus, Loki, Iago, Indiana Jones, Hannibal Lecter, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn
Artist or Clown
Strength: Defines excellence or shows people what doesn’t work, shows beauty and vision of the future or exposes something apparently beautiful as foolish/ugly in fact
Weakness: Can be a “fascist insisting on perfection” tear down everything so nothing has value
Ex: Achilles, Pygmalion, Frankenstein, King Lear, Holden Caulfield, David Copperfield
Lover
Strength: Provides care, understanding, sensuality to complete/make someone happy
Weakness: Can lose himself in the other, force the other to “stand in his shadow”
Ex: Heathcliffe and Cathy, Aphrodite, Rick and Ilsa (Casablanca) Paris (Iliad), Madame Bovary
Rebel
Strength: Courage to stand out from crowd and act against an enslaving system.
Weakness: Often can’t/doesn’t provide a better alternative and ends up destroying the system/society
Ex: Prometheus, Loki, Heathcliff, Holden Caulfield, Achilles, Hamlet

Note that characters can fit multiple archetypes. Like Luke in Star Wars is a prince-warrior-magician, Darth Vader is a king-warrior-magician, and Han Solo is a rebel-warrior.

(Not sure I agree with all of the analyses above, or how useful this is as a lens with which to see your characters. I have grown to become more suspicious of Jung and Jungian/archetypal thinking over the years…)

INDIVIDUALIZING CHARACTERS IN THE WEB

Once you figure out which of your characters are doing what functions, it’s time to make them into “real individuals.”

“You create a unique hero, opponent, and minor characters by comparing them…primarily through theme and opposition.”

So what is theme?

It’s “your view of the proper way to act in the world, expressed through your characters as they take action in the plot.”

This is NOT the same thing as “subject matter” (Eg racism, freedom). It is your MORAL VISION, how to live well or badly, and “it’s unique for each story you write.”

(Not sure about that. I think the same author can explore the same theme in different stories. In fact, they often do, because one’s moral vision doesn’t change from book to book)

KEY: You individuate your characters by finding the moral problem at the heart of the premise. You then play out the various possibilities of the moral problem in the body of the story.

Essentially, you’re creating a group of opponents vs allies that “force the hero to deal with the central moral problem.”

They’re all “variations on the theme” because each opponent “deals with the same moral problem in a different way.”

So what should you do?

Write down what you think the Central Moral Problem of your story is.
Compare your hero and all characters based on:
weakness
need (psychological and moral)
desire
values
power, status, ability
how each faces the central moral problem
Start with comparing your hero to your main opponent
After doing the hero vs main opponent, compare hero to other opponents, and then to his allies. Finally, compare opponents and allies to each other.

Truby uses Tootsie again as his example.

It’s a switch comedy (the hero has switched into another identity) which has one weakness — it gives you only 2–3 scenes. The rest has to come from good storytelling craft.

In the story, Michael’s central moral problem is “how a man treats a woman.” And here are his opponents:

Ron, the director: Lies to Julie, cheats on her and justifies it by saying the truth hurts more.
Julie: Allows men to abuse her.
John: A lecher who forces himself on actresses.
Sandy: Low self-esteem makes her apologize when Michael lies to and abuses her.
Les: Treats Michael (as his alter ego Dorothy) with respect and courts “her”
Rita Marshall: Hides her femininity to gain power.

What other character webs are there?

Truby gives some examples:

Great Expectations is an advanced web with double pairs of characters: Magwitch and Pip, Miss Havisham and Estella.

“Magwitch…secretly gives Pip money and freedom but no sense of responsibility. At the opposite extreme, Miss Havisham’s iron control of Estella and her bitterness at what a man has done to her turn the girl into a woman too cold to love.”

Vanity Fair is a “novel without a hero,” that is no one worth emulating, because all the characters are “variants of predatory animals climbing over the backs of others for money, power, and status.” Which reflects the author’s moral vision. The main hero-opponent pairing in this web is Amelia (immoral/obtuse) vs Becky (immoral/schemer).

CREATING YOUR HERO

How do you create a main character who feels complex, like a real human? Truby advises doing it in layers.

Starting with your character web will help with this process. Next, you need to follow these steps:

Meet the requirements of a great hero
Have character change
Give him a desire
Give him an opponent

Let’s break these down:

STEP 1. Meet the requirements of a great hero

Your hero should be fascinating. He has to “grab and hold the audience’s attention at all times [with] no dead time [or] padding.” In other words, he CAN’T BE BORING.

One way to avoid boring is to make your hero mysterious, make him hide something so readers want to know what it is.

Also, you want readers to identify with your hero, but not TOO much.

How do you do this?

Not by focusing on characteristics like “backround, job, dress, income, race, and sex.”

(This is one of the reasons why identity politics is so destructive and doesn’t work in storytelling)

Why not?

Because: “If audiences identified with specific characteristics, no one would identify with anyone, because each character would have too many traits the audience member doesn’t share.”

(Bingo! Intersectionality taken to the end leads to atomization, breakdown of empathy and destruction of compassion)

Instead, audiences identify with chaacters based on two things:

His desire
The moral problem he faces

So we’re back to the “desire and need” thing in the beginning of this book, are we?

Remember:

“Desire drives the story because the audience wants the hero to be successful. The moral problem is the deeper struggle of how to live properly with others and is what the audience wants the hero to solve.”

(One thought I have is how true these concepts are for more formulaic stories, like average murder mysteries?)

But as you create your character you want to make sure that your audience doesn’t identify TOO deeply with him or else they “won’t be able to step back and see how the hero changes and grows.”

Here, Truby cites some great advice from Peter Brooks, who was speaking to actors:

“When [the actor] sees himself in relation to the wholeness of the play…he will look at [his character’s] sympathetic and unsympathetic features from a different viewpoint, and in the end will make different decisions from those he made when he thought “identifying” with the character was all that mattered.”

(This is true, and the reason why “distance” and “depersonalization” is a necessary ingredient in societies and in life. Sometimes you need to not be too close to a thing in order to see it clearly and function properly).

Truby says, you want your audience to empathize (understand), not sympathize (approve), with your hero.

Because some of the “most powerful heroes in stories” are “not likable at all.” But they’re fascinating.

KEY: The audience has to understand the hero, but they may not necessarily like everything he does.

Because empathy is caring about and understanding someone. It doesn’t always mean liking the person, though.

KEY: Always show WHY the hero acts as he does.

The hero may not know his own true reason or motivation, but the reader should.

STEP 2. Have character change

This is also known as the character arc, character development, or range of change.

This may be difficult, but it’s one of the “most important steps in the writing process.”

To address this, Truby backs up to discuss what “the self” is in storytelling. The “fictional self” (aka character) in a story is “shown in action, in space and over time, and compared to others, to show how a person can live well or badly and how a person can grow over his lifetime.”

Different people have different conceptions of “self,” from “a single unit of personality overned internally with an iron hand” (See myth stories with warrior heroes) to “a loose collection of images, so…lacking inintegrity that it can shift its shape to something entirely different.” (See Kafka, Borges, Faulkner)

In between you have the self as “a single unit comprised of many often conflicting needs and desires” (See Ibsen, Chekhov, O’Neill) and “a series of roles a person plays, depending on what society demands at the time” (See Twain).

Whichever view you hold to, Truby argues that the purpose and techniques of character change are the same for all.

KEY: Character change is made possible at the beginning of the story by how you set it up.

KEY: Think of your hero as a “range of change, a range of possibilities,” from the beginning.

Truby’s rule of thumb is “the smaller the range, the less interesting the story; the bigger the range, the more interesting but riskier” (because you have limited time in a story).

(I think this is why successful series fiction works. You can do a REALLY big arc over time when you have the length of 3+ books to work with)

And how does Truby define “range of change”?

“It is the range of possibilities of who the character can be, defined by his understanding of himself…In a ood story, as the hero goes after a goal, he is forced to challenge his most deep-seated beliefs.”

KEY: True character change involves challenging and changing of basic beliefs, leading to new moral action by the hero.

Here are some examples of character change that are more common:

Child to adult: Aka coming-of-age (Huckleberry Finn, David Copperfield, Good Will Hunting, Forrest Gump)
Adult to leader: Character goes from self-focused to helping others find the right path as well. (The Matrix, Braveheart, Forrest Gump, Hamlet, The Lion King)
Cynic to participant: A type of “Adult to leader.” (Casablanca, Han Solo in Star Wars)
Leader to tyrant: Not all character change is positive (The Godfather, Macbeth, Howards End)
Leader to visionary: From helping a few to helping an entire society. (Moses, Jesus, often religious stories)
Metamorphosis: Extreme character change where character actually becomes another person, animal, thing. (The Wolf Man, The Fly, Metamorphosis)

So how, exactly, do you create character change in your story?

Begin with the self-revelation at the end of the change then work backwards to determine the starting point (the hero’s need and desire) then figure out the “steps of development in between.”

Because, “as with any journey, before you can take your first step, you have to know the endpoint of where you’re going.”

And every good self-revelation has 2 parts:

The moment of revelation
This should be sudden, for “maximum dramatic force.” It must be NEW info to the hero who realizes he’s been living a lie and has been hurting others. And it should “trigger the hero to take new moral action immediately”
The setup
This requires the hero to behiding something from himself that is hurting him in a real way. But he also must be a thinking person who is “capable of seeing the truth and knowing right action.”

“One of the powers of storytelling is showing us how a human being who is so capable of brilliant and creative thought is also capable of intricate and enslaving delusion.”

Next, Truby introduces a more advanced technique for showing character change, which he calls “double reversal.”

The idea is to give the opponent AND the hero a self-revelation, so they learn from each other, and “the audience gets two insights about how to act and live in the world instead of one.”

This has some advantaes:

You can “show the audience the right way of acting and being that is both subtler and clearer than a single revelation.” (Truby compares this to stereo vs mono sound)
The audience isn’t so locked onto the hero, letting them see more of the big picture.

To do a double reversal:

Give both hero and opponent a weakness and need (they don’t have to be the same)
Make the opponent capable of learning and changing.
Give the opponent as well as the hero a self-revelation during or right after the battle.
Connect the two self-revelations. Hero and Opponent learn from each other.
Your moral vision is the best of what both characters learn.

Double reversals are not common, but can be found in love stories because they’re designed for hero and lover to learn from each other. Examples of the double reversal include Pride and Prejudice, The Music Man, Casablanca, Kramer vs Kramer.

STEP 3. Give him a desire

The desire line is the “spine of the story.” And to create it, you need 3 things:

Only ONE desire line that steadily builds in important and intensity. Otherwise your story will go in too many directions and fall apart. Your hero needs a “single overriding goal.”
The desire should be specific. The more specific, the better. How do you know if it’s specific? Ask yourself “if there is a specific moment in the story when the audience knows whether your hero has accomplished his goal or not.” So you can’t just say your hero’s goal is to “be independent.” But specify what independence means: Leaving home? Getting married? Getting divorced?
The desire, if accomplished, should be accomplished near the END of the story. If it’s accomplished in the middle, your hero needs another desire line, effectively creating two stories stuck together. But that may hurt your narrative drive.

Here are some examples of desire lines that “fulfill the criteria”:

Saving Private Ryan: To find Private Ryan and bring him home alive.
The Godfather: To take revenge on Vito Corleone’s shooters.
The Verdict: To win the case.

STEP 4. Give him an opponent

Truby emphasizes: “I’m not exaggerating when I say that the trick to defining your hero and figuring out your story is to figure out your opponent.”

Because the most important relationship in your book is between hero and opponent. “Structurally, the opponent always holds the key, because your hero learns through his opponent” as the opponent attacks the hero’s great weakness, which forces the hero to “deal with it and grow.”

KEY: The main character is only as good as the person he fights.

Truby has readers think about how the most exciting tennis matches are between players who really challenge each other, not someone with a weak opponent. It’s the same in storytelling.

“If you get this relationship right, the story will almost certainly work. If you get this relationship wrong, the story will most definitely fail.”

So how do you create an awesome opponent?

Make the opponent necessary to the hero. Aka, someone who is “best able to attack the great weakness of the hero.”
Make him human. that is, “as complex and valuable as the hero.”
Give him the opposite values of the hero.
Give him a strong but flawed moral argument. If he’s just inherently bad, he’s boring.
Give him some similarities to the hero. The differences and contrasts come out more when they have something in common.
Keep him in the same place as the hero. They need to be in close proximity for the opponent to “relentlessly attack the hero’s weaknesses until she fixes them or falls.”

(I’m not sure I agree with all that. To be honest, many great stories have one-dimensional villains, and they work. Take Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, for example).

Truby gives a few examples of great opponents, such as Iago, who opposes Othello. Iago isn’t a warrior-king like Othello, but he’s able to attack Othello’s greatest weakness, his insecurity about his marriage.

BUILDING CONFLICT

“Once you set up a hero and an opponent competing for the same goal, you must build the conflict steadily until the final battle.”

You want to put “constant pressure” on your hero to “force him to change.

KEY: A simple opposition between two characters “kills any chance at depth, complexity, or the reality of human life” so instead, you want a WEB of opposition.

Here, Truby introduces the concept of “four-corner opposition.” In which you have a hero facing not just one main opponent, but at least two more secondary opponents.

Each of these characters take up one corner of your metaphorical box, and you have to keep 5 rules in mind:

Each opponent should attack the hero’s great weakness in a different way.
Try to put the opponents in conflict with each other, not just the hero. This creates intense conflict “and a dense plot.”
Put the values of all four characters in conflict.
Push the characters to the corners by makin them as different as possible from the other three.

“Great storytelling isn’t just conflict between characters. It’s conflict between characters and their values…The beliefs of the hero have no meaning, and do not get expressed in the story, unless they come into conflict with the beliefs of at least one other character”

(Very true, and this is why I say all stories have three parts)

The classic way of doing this has two characters fighting for the same goal and as they fight, their values/way of life conflicts, too.

KEY: When listing your character’s values, be as detailed as possible. They shouldn’t have just ONE single value, but a CLUSTER.

KEY: Look for the positive and negative sides of the same value to see “how each character is most likely to make a mistake while fighting for what he believes.

For example: determined/aggressive, honest/insensitive, patriotic/domineering.

Note that you can also create four-corner opposition at different levels of the story. In the Iliad, there’s four-corner opposition at the level of within the reeks. And there’s also a four-corner opposition.

Now, for the practical exercise:

Create your character web by listing all characters and how they function (are they hero, fake-ally opponent, etc)
come up with your central moral problem and compare the characters’ structure elements (weakness, need — psych/moral, desire, values, power, how they face central moral problem).
Begin comparing your hero with main opponent: variations on a moral problem
Consider requirements of a hero (fascinating, audience can identify but not too much, audience empathizes not sympathizes, hero has moral and psych need)
Decide on your character’s change, write it down, then work backwards to the need.
Write down what beliefs are challenged and changed by the hero in your story.
Clarify your hero’s desire line
Detail your opponents
List a few values per opponent, they should counter the hero somehow.
Consider: “In what ways are…the minor characters variations on the hero’s unique weakness and moral problem?”
Map out your four-corner opposition and push the four major characters far out

And here Truby examines the four main characters in A Streetcar Named Desire to show how the three opponents (main — Stanley, secondary — Stella and Mitch) work against the hero (Blanche).

Quotes & Comments

First line(s): Tootsie was a huge hit because its main character, played by Dustin Hoffman, dressed up as a woman. Right? Wrong.

Last line(s): Four-Corner Opposition Blanche (artist) Stanley (warrior-king) Stella (mother) Mitch (none) [Author’s analysis of Streetcar Named Desire]

Creating a character all sounds very clear and logical when Truby lays it out like this, but the reality is, in actual writing, it’s not so straightforward. At least, not for me.
There’s a bit of instinct/subconscious working along with your conscious mind which is thinking about all this. I think the real key to writing (storytelling) well is learning how to manage or balance your Self 1 and Self 2 (See the book: The Inner Game of Tennis), aka your conscious and subconscious.

Chapter 5 — Moral Argument

In This Chapter

What a theme is, and why it’s one of the main purposes of telling a story.
How to use theme to create a strong story.
A 10-step strategy to express the moral argument with 4 possible endings.
5 forms of a moral argument, with examples.
13 steps to figuring out your moral argument.

Stories that “preach a message” are soundly disliked, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t supposed to have a powerful theme — properly expressed, these stories are more popular and esteemed than otherwise.

Because a story is “not simply a sequence of events or surprises designed to entertain an audience” but “a sequence of actions, with moral implications and effects, designed to express a larger theme.”

(So many different definitions of story!)

But what is a theme?

It’s not mere subject matter, as some people think. Truby defines theme as:

“the author’s view of how to act in the world. It is your moral vision.”

(Solid definition. And simple too, which is great).

“Your moral vision is totally original to you, and expressing it to an audience is one of the main purposes of telling the story.”

(I’m not sure your moral vision is TOTALLY original to you, but I can see arguments going both ways.)

Remember, that a good story should be a “livin system in which the parts work together to make an integrated whole.”

Truby compares stories to the body in this way:

Character = heart
Structure = skeleton
Theme = brain (the high design of the story)

You want to be careful with the theme so that it doesn’t “become so dominant that it tursn the story…into a philosophical thesis.”

Here, Truby warns beginning writers of trying to deliver their moral vision through dialogue, so it doesn’t feel overwhelming and preachy.

“Good writers express their moral vision slowly and subtly, primarily throuh the story structure and the way the hero deals with a particular situation.”

FINDING THE THEME LINE IN THE DESIGNING PRINCIPLE

The designing principle is the key to your premise line and theme line, Truby says.

First, check how the action in the story “hurts other people and how, if at all, do the characters make things right?”

For example, a design principle could be Traveling (Huckleberry Finn, King Kong’s journey to Skull Island), or a Single Grand Symbol (The Scarlet Letter, For Whom the Bell Tolls).

Or you could combine Two Grand Symbols like in Heart of Darkness which uses the symbol of Heart and Darkness.

Other designing principles? Unit of time, Use of storyteller, Special way of unfolding the story, etc.

Here, Truby gives some examples of stories with their designing principles (DP) and theme lines (TL). Including:

Harry Potter series
DP: Magician prince learns to be a man/king via magical boarding school over course of 7 years.
TL: When you’re blessed with great talent and power, you must become a leader and sacrifice for the good of others.
Christmas Carol
DP: Trace the rebirth of a man by forcing him to see his past, present, and future over the course of Christmas Eve.
TL: A man lives a happier life when he gives to others.
It’s a Wonderful Life
DP: Express the power of an individual by showing what a town/nation would be like if that one man never lived.
TL: A man’s riches come not from his money but from the friends/family he serves.

SPLITTING THE THEME INTO OPPOSITIONS

Your theme line is “your moral argument focused into one sentence.”

Once you’ve got that down, you want to split it into “a set of thematic oppositions” which you attach to the hero and opponents “as they fight.” Truby gives 3 main techniques for doing this:

Give hero a moral decision
Make each character a variation on the theme
Place characters’ values in conflict

Then Truby breaks it down:

Method 1. Hero’s moral decision

The “classic strategy” for “dramatizing the hero’s moral line,” Truby says, is to make him get worse before he gets better, as his desperation to beat his opponent brings out the worst of him.

Ultimately, though, he comes to the realization that he has a choice between two (and only two!) ways of acting.

At some point in the story, he must make the decision, and his decision is final. This decision usually immediately follows the hero’s moral self-revelation. Sometimes, the decision precedes the self-revelation, which is provoked by the decision and his realization that he made the right/wrong choice.

For example, in Casablanca, Rick must choose between Ilsa or fighting the Nazis. In Vertigo, Scottie has to decide whether or not to forgive Judy/Madeleine and when he chooses not to, realizes that was the wrong decision.

Method 2. Variations on a theme

Make each of the major characters deal with the same moral problem but in a different way. Start by comparing the hero and main opponents, then compare the hero and the other opponents.

For example, in Tootsie, all of the main characters are a variation on the moral problem of “how a man should treat a woman/how women allow themselves to be treated by men.”

Method 3. Characters’ values in conflict

Give a cluster of values to each character and make them as different from the others as possible, so those values will come into conflict.

For example, in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, the characters are fighting over who will control their former family estate. Their values are as follows:

Madame Ranevsky: real love, beauty, the past
Lopakhin: money, status, power, practicality, the future
Varya: hard work, family, marriage, practicality
Trofimov: truth, learning, compassion, higher love

…and so on.

KEY: If you use 2-part opposition (good vs evil) your moral argument will be simplistic. A web of moral oppositions better reflects the moral complexity of real life.

THEME THROUGH STRUCTURE

You don’t want to show your moral argument through a verbal debate between hero and opponent. You want to do it by showing hero and opponent “taking certain means to reach a goal.”

“one of the great principles of storytelling is that structure doesn’t just carry content; it is content. And it is far more powerful content than what your characters say.”

(This is an interesting thought).

Truby expands on that thought:

“The convergent point of story structure is the battle, and right after that, the self-revelation and moral decision. In the battle, the audience sees not just which force but also which set of values is superior.”

Now, Truby shares a basic strategy to express the moral argument, promising to go over a few variations later.

The basic strategy goes like this:

Hero starts with set of beliefs/values.
He has a moral weakness that is hurting others in some way, but is unaware or too weak to fix this yet.
Based on this weakness, the hero has a moral need to learn how to grow and live better.
The hero does his first immoral action as evidence to audience of his moral flaw.
The hero has a desired goal that brings him in conflict with the opponent who has different values but the same goal.
The story is driven by the hero and opponent acting to reach the goal.
Throughout the beginning and middle of the story, the desperate hero continues to commit immoral actions because he is losing to the opponent and thinks this will help him win. He is criticized, but justifies himself.
The hero’s ally attacks him to show his methods are wrong.
The hero develops a more obsessive drive to reach the goal at any cost.
Immoral acts continue to intensify, as do criticisms and justifications.

At this point, Truby says, the theme can “explode” in one of four places at the end of the story:

The final battle decides the goal and shows which sets of values/ideas are superior.
The hero takes one final action (moral or immoral) against the opponent before or during the battle.
The crucible of battle gives the hero a moral self-revelation on how wrong he’s been.
The hero makes a moral choice between two paths, proving that he’s gotten a moral self-revelation.

Now, Truby warns readers that “the single biggest reason a story comes across as preachy is because there is an imbalance between moral argument and plot…if you don’t have enough plot to support the moral argument, it will come crashing down as a sermonizing bore.”

But what is plot? Truby defines it as “an intricate choreography of actions by the hero and the opponents designed to surprise the audience. It is this element of surprise, of magic, that floats the moral sequence and gives it its punch.”

Truby gives a few examples of this moral line, for example, in The Iliad, the story uses the hero’s slow decline and then rise at the self-revelation, twice:

First, Achilles is angry at Agamemnon for taking the woman he won. But his pride (moral weakness) makes him withhold his services in battle, which results in other soldiers dying. As the story continues, Achille’s anger and selfishness grows until his friend Patroklos dies and he reconciles with Agamemnon and returns to fight.

Second, Achilles is angry at his second opponent, Hector, and declines morally when he desecrates Hector’s body by dragging it around. When Hector’s father Priam pleads for the body, Achilles has a deeper self-revelation (compassion over vengeance) and lets Priam have the body.

“The moral argument is most powerful when it is most dramatic. That means, among other things, holding off the hero’s moral self-revelation and decision until as close to the end of the story as possible.”

VARIANTS OF MORAL ARGUMENT

You can use more than one type of moral argument in your story, although combining forms, Truby warns, is risky. So what are the forms?

Good vs Bad: Hero is good throughout, villain is bad throughout
Hero may make mistakes, but doesn’t act immoral. Villain is morally flawed, even inherently immoral/evil.
(The Matrix, City Slickers, Forrest Gump, The Wizard of Oz, The Last of the Mohicans, Star Wars)
Tragedy: Twists the moral argument at the end. The hero has a fatal flaw and the self-revelation comes too late to avoid destruction.
(Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Wuthering Heights, Vertigo, Amadeus, Citizen Kane)
Pathos: Shows the beauty of “endurance, lost causes, and the doomed man.” The hero never gets a self-revelation because he’s “incapable of one, [but] keeps fighting all the way to the end.”
(Don Quixote, A Streetcar Named Desire, many Japanese films)
Satire (comedy of beliefs) & Irony (story logic where character gets the opposite of what he wants). The moral argument is made by setting up a constant contrast between a character who thinks he’s moral based on the beliefs of his society, but whose actions lead to immoral effects.
(Pride & Prejudice, Emma, Madame Bovary, M*A*S*H, The Prince and the Pauper, The Importance of Being Earnest)
Black Comedy: Poking fun at the illogic of a system that is innately destructive. The self-revelation is withheld from the hero to give it more strongly to the audience.
(Goodfellas, Catch-22, Dr. Strangelove, etc.)

As he explains the above moral argument types, Truby also throws in a few more-detailed examples from stories like Emma, King Lear, Wuthering Heights, and more.

COMBINING MORAL ARGUMENTS

The above moral arguments aren’t mutually exclusive. You can definitely combine some of them. For example, James Joyce’s Ulysses combines good-versus-bad with satire-irony. And The Cherry Orchard combines pathos with satire-irony.

But be careful, this can be tricky. You have to really “master technique” to do this well.

THE UNIQUE MORAL VISION

Here, Truby cites Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter as a unique moral vision via a “three-person character opposition that makes the case for a natural morality based on real love.”

(The problem I have with this is Truby doesn’t define what he means by “real love.” From what I know of Scarlet Letter, I wouldn’t say that it is an example of real love at all. Possibly unrequited love on Hester’s part, but no one really shows her genuine love back)

A few other examples of stories Truby thinks shows a “unique moral vision” include Star Wars, which blends Eastern and Western morality, and The Godfather, which has a system based on modern business + warfare.

“Taglines like ‘I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse,’ ‘It’s not personal, it’s business,’ and ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer’ are the catechism for the modern American version of Machiavelli’s Prince.”

(See, the problem with calling this a “unique moral vision” is that it isn’t unique. Truby himself cites The Prince as an early version of The Godfather concept. There’s really nothing new under the sun).

MORAL ARGUMENT IN DIALOGUE

Finally, we come to dialogue. According to Truby:

“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.”

Alternately, you can show the moral argument in dialogue in a conflict between hero and opponent. As George and Potter argue early on in the movie, It’s a Wonderful Life.

Another place is when the opponent “gives a moral justification fo rhis actions, even though he is wrong.”

Giving the opponent a “strong-but-wrong justification” makes him more complex, and “because the hero is only as good as the person he fights, you give depth to your hero as well.”

“Never give your opponent an obviously weak argument. Give him the best, most compelling argument you can. Make sure he is right about some things.”

So to sum up, here’s what to do:

Turn your designing principle into a theme line (your view of right and wrong action, in this story, stated in one sentence)
Look for any techniques like symbols that can condense your moral statement into one line.
Write down the key moral choice the hero must make near the end of the estory.
State in one line the central moral problem your hero will confront throughout the story.
Start with the hero and main opponent and tell how each major character approaches the central moral problem in a different way.
List the values of each of the major characters and how those values come into conflict.

And here are the steps for figuring out the moral argument:

Start with the hero’s essential beliefs and values
What’s your hero’s moral weakness?
What’s his moral need?
What’s his first immoral action? (Should be an outgrowth of his moral weakness)
What’s his specific goal/desire?
What are the specific actions he takes to get to that goal?
Along the way, what other immoral actions does he take, and what criticism does he receive and how does he justify himself?
How does his ally attack him morally to try to get him to see his moral need?
When and how does the hero get obsessed with winning. Is there a decision point?
What immoral actions do the above decision cause him to take? What criticisms does he receive and justifications does he provide?
During the final battle, how do you express whose values win out?
What is the hero’s moral self-revelation? His moral decision?
What is the thematic revelation — is there a story event where you express your moral vision in a way other than the hero’s self-revelation?

Truby finishes off the chapter by showing how these steps work in the example of the movie, Casablanca.

Quotes & Comments

First line(s): According to Hollywood lore, it was Samuel Goldwyn who said, “If you want to send a message, try Western Union.”

Last line(s): Thematic Revelation Renault’s surprise flip at the end, where he decides to join Rick in the fight (a classic double reversal), produces the thematic revelation: in the battle against fascism, everyone must play a part.

This chapter is probably equivalent to what I call the “Core” of a story. It’s interesting to read Truby’s take on it, but I’m not sure yet I fully understand his point so I can’t say I completely agree with it.
For one, we clearly have a different fundamental worldview, although we may have more in common due to having both grown up in an American context, so to some degree we “share the same water,” aka core ideas about life and so forth, but in other ways we are very different
(For example: Later in the book, Truby talks about Jungian archetypes, which I’m not super well-versed on, and rather wary of for reasons too complicated to get into here)
However, I do agree that the moral argument of a story is really the heart of the story, the reason why the story exists in the first place.
And just like with people, if a story has a good heart, it is a good story, even if some of the surface elements are not super-polished — but if a story has a bad heart (evil, dark, etc), no amount of surface tweaking is going to make it a good story.

Chapter 6 — Story World

In This Chapter

5 steps to create your story world, with examples.
4 elements to detail in your story world.
10-step writing exercise to create your own story world.

Truby brings up the example of Ulysses and Harry Potter, saying that the writers of both stories understood that “creating a unique world for the story — and oranically connecting it to the characters — is as essential to great storytelling as character, plot, theme, and dialogue.

(This is true. Whenever I want some fun, non-intense fiction for relaxation, I find myself reaching for certain cozy mystery type stories, not so much for the plot or sometimes even the characters, but just for the world that it brings me into)

Given how little time and space you have as a writer, “the more meaning you condense in the story, the more the story expands in the minds of the audience, with the story elements mentally ricocheting against one another in almost infinite ways.”

Meaning can be found in “forms and spaces,” aka your story setting.

Truby gives the sequence for creating your story world:

Start with the design principle again
Divide the arena into visual oppositions based on how your characters oppose each other
Detail the world using 3 of 4 major building blocks — natural setting, artificial spaces, technology
Connect the story world to your hero’s development, applying the 4th major building block — time
Track the development of the story world through story structure using a visual seven steps

FINDING THE STORY WORLD IN THE DESIGNING PRINCIPLE

Truby warns that finding the world in the designing principle is harder than finding premise, characters, and theme. Because while the desining principle “describes linear story movement,” the story world is “everything surrounding the characters all at once…represent[ing] simultaneous elements and actions.”

For example, in Harry Potter, the designing principle is “a magician prince learns to be a man and kin by attending a boarding school for sorcerors over the course of seven school years.” Its theme is “when you are blessed with great talent and power, you must become a leader and sacrifice for the good of others.” The story world is “a school for wizards in a giant magical medieval castle.”

THE ARENA OF THE STORY

Truby suggests getting down the designing principle and one-line description of the story world, and then finding a “single arena that marks the physical boundaries of that world.”

In other words, don’t go anywhere you want in your story just because you can. Try t keep the story in a more contained area to build drama. Truby suggests four methods for doing this:

Start big and then condense. Your largest scope should be described near the beginning, then focus on “smaller worlds” as the story progresses. (see: Casablanca, The Matrix, Mary Poppins, It’s a Wonderful Life)
Send the hero on a journey through the “general same area” that develops along one line. Don’t make the story feel like a series of disconnected episodes. (See: Titanic, The Wild Bunch, The African Queen)
Send the hero on a circular journey through the “general same area.” In other words, the hero returns home at the end. (See: The Wizard of Oz, Finding Nemo, Don Quixote, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Alice in Wonderland)
Make your hero a fish out of water. Start him in one arena briefly, then jump him to a second world for the rest of the story. (See: Beverly Hills Cop, Crocodile Dundee, Dances with Wolves).

Within the arena, your world should have some visual oppositions to your hero. Pick out 3–4 central visual oppositions.

For example, in It’s a Wonderful Life, viewers get to see two different versions of the same town, Bedford Falls and Pottersville. The town itself represents the opposition between Geore Bailey and Mr. Potter, manifesting the different values of the two men.

And in The Great Gatsby, you have a four-corner opposition with Gatsby vs Tom, Gatsby vs Daisy, Gatsby vs Nick, and Nick vs Tom.

These opposing forces are symbolized by the flat plains of the Midwest vs the tall towns and mansions of the East, the established wealth of the East Egg vs the nouveau West Egg, and Gatsby’s mansion vs Tom and Daisy’s mansion, Nick’s little cottage vs Gatsby’s mansion, and so on.

DETAILING THE STORY WORLD

There are four major elements to detail the visual oppositions of your story world:

Land / natural setting
People / manmade spaces
Technology / tools
Time (how the world develops over the course of the story)

When it comes to the natural world, different settings have different symbolic meanings. The ocean, for example, is both a “game of life and death played out on the grandest scale” as well as a “weightless, floating utopian dreamworld” and a “terrifying graveyard where ancient worlds and secrets are waiting to be discovered.” (See: Titanic, Finding Nemo, The Little Mermaid, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea)

Outer space is “the ocean of ‘out there’” a promise of “unending adventure.” (See: Apollo 13, Dune, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Star Trek, Alien)

The forest is a “natural cathedral” for contemplative people, but also “foreboding…where people get lost.” It’s tamer than a jungle, slower, but “still deadly.” (See: Lord of the Rings, Return of the Jedi, Harry Potter, The Wizard of Oz, the Blair Witch Project)

The jungle is “the state of nature,” it creates a “feeling of suffocation” and is a “primal place” that shows the power of “nature over man.” (See: Tarzan, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Heart of Darkness, etc)

Both desert and ice are “places of dying and death, at all times. Even stories have a hard time growing there.” They are “impersonal in their brutality” but they also “toughen up” the strong-willed through isolation. (See: Star Wars, The Call of the Wild, Fargo, Lawrence of Arabia, etc)

Islands are the “ideal setting for creating a story in a social context.” Because it’s a “miniature of the earth…a separated place…the laboratory of man” and can be heaven or hell, utopia or dystopia. (See: Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Treasure Island, Lord of the Flies, Jurassic Park, Lost, Gilligan’s Island)

Mountains are places of greatness where “the strong go to prove themselves” through seclusion, discomfort, direct confrontation of nature. But it is also a “site of hierarchy, privilege, and tyranny.” (See: Batman Begins, A Farewell to Arms, Last of the Mohicans, The Shining, Dances with Wolves)

The plain is “wide open and accessible to all…totally free.” The place of “equality, freedom, and rights of the common man” but also a place where “the mediocre make their lives.” (See: In Cold Blood, A Farewell to Arms, Field of Dreams, Dances with Wolves)

The river is a path, or road into or out of somewhere. It’s a place of “physical, moral, and emotional passage.” (See: Huckleberry Finn, Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now)

Next. Let’s consider weather. These also symbolize different things, for example:

Lightning/thunder: Passion, terror, death
Rain: Sadness, loneliness, boredom, coziness
Wind: Destruction, desolation
Fog: Obfuscation, mystery
Sun: Happiness, fun, freedom, corruption
Snow: Sleep, serenity, inexorable death

And now, what about man-made spaces?

The house is “a person’s first enclosure” the “home of the family, which is the central unit of social life and the central unit of drama.”

It’s primarily a protector, “a strong foundation from which we go out and take on the world.”

You’ve got Warm Houses, that are big, but not mansion-like, with different rooms for each unique resident to thrive. The power of a Warm House is “it appeals to the audience’s sense of their own childhood, either real or imagined.”

Like the house, the Bar can be warm too. It’s a place where “nobody has to change,” as in Casablanca. This bar is both a utopia and dystopia. It’s timeless.

Then we have the Terrifying House, which has crossed the line “from cocoon to prison.” It is “an outgrowth of the great weakness and need of the character. This house is the hero’s biggest fear made manifest.”

Structure-wise, this kind of house “represents the power the past holds over the present. It can be grand and Gothic, or

(See: Miss Havisham’s mansion in Great Expectations, or the house in Wuthering Heights).

What about the cellar and attic? In a house, the “central opposition” is between these two. While the cellar is underground, a graveyard of secrets, where “plots are hatched,” the attic is a “place where great thoughts and art are created” with its benefit of height and perspective.

Next, we have the road, which calls people to “go out, explore, become someone new.” It is a linear story.

Then we have the city, “the biggest man-made microcosm.” If that’s a bit large and overwhelming, there is the institution, an organization with a “unique function, boundaries, set of rules, hierarchy, system of operation.”

You can see the city as a mountaintop (high towers, hierarchies), or an ocean (has a surface and depth under-the-surface, a playground for people), or as a jungle, forest, etc., etc.

Truby talks a bit more about going from microcosms to larger views of the world, and then comments on the technique of having “passageways between worlds.”

These passages are used when the two words are very different, like Alice going through the rabbit hole and the mirror, or Dorothy Gale being taken up by the cyclone, or the children going to Narnia through a wardrobe, etc.

The passageway takes your characters from one world to another, and also functions as a “decompression chamber, allowing your audience to make the transition from the realistic to the fantastic.”

Next. Truby briefly talks about tools (technology), which can include anything from a magic wand to a machine gun, depending on your story. Note that “technology is most useful in genres that place the most emphasis on the story world, such as science fiction and fantasy.”

CONNECTING THE WORLD TO THE HERO’S OVERALL DEVELOPMENT

So when you’re building your word, start by identifying the “key visual oppositions based on characters and values.”

Next, “look at the endpoints of your hero’s development.

Truby points out that most stories move the hero overall from “slavery to freedom” and so the visual world must reflect that. It should start from a place where the land/people/technology are selfish and out of balance, to having things in balance, and the people live as a supportive community.

KEY: In most stories, the world is a physical expression of who your hero is and how he develops…the world should “embody, highlight, or accentuate” your hero’s weakness or “draw it out in its worst form.”

For example, in Vertigo, the hero’s psychological weakness is his fear of heights. The world therefore is built to exploit that, with towers and rooftops in San Francisco accentuating his weakness and the drama of the story.

Generally, the hero and world develop together. If the hero starts in a state of “slavery” then moves through “greater slavery” and then to “freedom,” them so does the world — as in stories like Star Wars 4–6, the Lord of the Rings, The Lion King, It’s a Wonderful Life.

But there are cases where the hero goes from “slavery” to “death” while the world goes from “slavery” to “freedom,” because the hero’s self-realization comes too late for him, but his death is a sacrifice that sets his world free after he’s gone, as in Hamlet, A Tale of Two Cities, or The Seven Samurai.

TIME IN THE STORY WORLD

Truby starts with a couple “fallacies” of past and future in storytelling:

Regarding the past, he says that “as a storyteller, you are always writing fiction.” Even historical fiction is fiction, not history. So the idea of “not judging the past by our standards” doesn’t make sense. “We show them in order to judge ourselves by comparison.” Historical stories are designed to either show us past values that are still hurting people today, or past values that are good and should be brought back today.

As for the “fallacy of the future,” which is common in science fiction, people assume sci-fi is about “predicting what will happen in the future” but stories set in the future are NOT actually about the future. They’re about giving readers another lens to “abstract the present in order to understand it better.” It highlights the consequences “if we fail to choose wisely.”

So, on to the “techniques of natural time.” Consider:

Seasons: There are cycles and rituals that come with the different seasons that carry meaning. If you show all four seasons, your story will be a circular one, which can be positive or negative.
Holidays: These also contain rituals that express meaning. Pay attention to the “philosophy inherent in that ritual and decide in what way you agree or disagree with it.”
The single day: This is an increment of time that can “create simultaneous story movement while maintaining narrative drive” by showing multiple characters acting at the same time, OR it can create a funnel effect with urgency if you use a “12-hour clock” or a circular story with a “24-hour clock.”
The time endpoint: AKA a ticking clock, this shows the audience that some action must be completed in a specific time. This is common in action, caper, and suicide mission stories.

STORY WORLD THROUGH STRUCTURE

Now, you need to “connect the world with the hero’s development at every step of the story.”

“Structure is what allows you to express your theme without sermonizing.”

How do you do this? By creating a visual 7 steps

Weakness and need: Show a subworld that is a “physical manifestation of the hero’s weakness or fear.”
Desire: The hero expresses his goal in this subworld
Opponent: Wherever the opponent lives, it expresses “his power and ability to attack the hero’s great weakness” it is an “extreme version of the hero’s world of slavery.”
Apparent defeat or temporary freedom: Typically, the place where the hero is apparently defeated is the narrowest space in the story up to the point. Or a utopia-like place for a hero experiencing temporary freedom.
Visit to death: The hero travels to an underworld, faces his mortality “in a place that represents the elements of decline, aging, and death.”
Battle: Should occur in the most confined place in the story for a “pressure-cooker” effect.
Freedom or slavery: The world ends as a place of freedom or greater slavery/death.

And here are all the elements shown in Star Wars:

Weakness and need: Luke is stuck on a barren farm.
Desire: Same as above.
Opponent: Darth Vader is on the Death Star, a giant sphere.
Apparent defeat or temporary freedom: Collapsing garbage dump with a monster under water (combines “apparent defeat” with “visit to death”)
Visit to death: See above.
Battle: A trench, where the pilots have to dogfight while not having much room to maneuver.
Freedom or slavery: Hall of Heroes, where the heroes are celebrated.

Truby also gives another example from It’s a Wonderful Life, which clearly shows how the world reflects the character.

“All the minor characters, who have been defined in great detail up to this point, are shown as having fulfilled their worst potential…This suggests that all people are a range of possibilities and that whether they are at their best or at their worst depends on the world they live in and the values they live by.”

He points out that Wonderful Life is a “social fantasy on the level of Twain and Dickens. And it borrows from them both.”

Truby recommends borrowing from other storytellers to “add texture,” as long as you “use it playfully” and “keep the references light.”

Wonderful Life for example, names the angel Clarence, after a character in Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, and the story itself is a version of Dicken’s Christmas Carol.

Truby wraps up this section with a few more story examples, and then gives a writing exercise:

Write the one-line description of your story world.
Define the overall arena
Based on the value oppositions between your characters, assign visual opponents that “complement or express these value oppositions.”
Create a unique combination of land, people, and technology that will make up your world.
Describe the system your hero lives and works in. What are the rules, hierarchies of power, your hero’s place in that hierarchy.
Consider natural settings, and whether or not they are useful to your story world.
Also consider: weather, man-made spaces, miniatures, becoming bigger or smaller, passageways, technology
Look at the hero’s change over time and whether or not the world will change with him.
Then consider seasons, holiday/rituals if relevant, and the “visual seven steps” (weakness/need, desire, opponent, apparent defeat or temporary freedom, visit to death, battle, freedom or slavery)
Connect your natural settings and man-made spaces. There are 3 subworlds to consider:
Weakness subworld — where your hero starts, reflecting his “great weakness”
Opponent subworld — the opponent’s world expresses his power and “ability to attack the hero’s great weakness.”
Battle subworld — the place of the battle is the most confined space of the story

Truby gives an example using the world of Harry Potter:

Value oppositions and visual oppositions: Hogwarts vs world of Muggles. Hogwarts vs Dark Forest (Voldemort’s subworld). Gryffindor vs Slytherin (Draco’s subworld)
Land, people, tech: Hogwartz is a modern-day prep school in a medieval world of castles, lakes, forest. Tech is a hybrid magic “with a high-tech sheen” (a la Nimbus 2000)
Systems: Prep school + Magic World.
Natural settings: Howarts is near a lake and forest.
Weather: It rains when Hagrid arrives to bring Harry to Hogwarts.
Man-made spaces: The Dursley’s house, the Dickensian Diagon Alley, the warm house of Hogwarts which is cozy, diverse, and occasionally terrifying.
Miniatures: Quiddith is a miniature of the magical world and Harry’s place in it.
Passageways: Opening the brick wall to Diagon Alley, Platform 9 3/4, trapdoor to the “underworld of Hogwarts, guarded by the three-headed dog.”
Technology: Magic tech (owls deliver mail, wands choose wizards, brooms have different specs, and more)
Hero’s change and world’s change: Harry changes and grows up, but Hogwarts stays the same.
Seasons: Hogwarts’ school year goes through all the seasons.
Holiday or ritual: Halloween and Christmas are part of the rhythm of the school year, but “the author doesn’t comment on the underlying philosophy of either.”

…and so on.

Quotes & Comments

First line(s): Ulysses and the Harry Potter novels exemplify one of the keys to great storytelling.

Last line(s): New Equilibrium Train station. With the school year over, the students are about to go through the passageway back to the mundane world. But Harry is now armed with a picture book that Hagrid gives him that shows him in the loving arms of the parents he never knew.

This chapter was tiring to read, I have to be honest. I don’t think the ideas presented here are entirely as universal/useful as they are one author’s way of looking at story, and perhaps more complicated than it needed to be.
I actually got stuck on this chapter for the longest time until I forced myself to push through and keep reading the rest of the book.

Chapter 7 — Symbol Web

In This Chapter

How symbols work and how to create a good one (as well as a symbol web), in 6 steps, with examples.
The different elements that can be symbolized (actions, objects, etc.).

Truby urges his readers to consider symbols as “jewels sewn into the story tapestry that have great emotional effect” and power, if you use them right.

What is symbol, though? Truby calls it “the technique of the small.” It is an object representing something else that is repeated throughout the story

HOW SYMBOLS WORK

“A symbol is highly concentrated meaning,” Truby says, calling it “The most focused condenser-expander of any storytelling technique.”

How do you create a good symbol?

Start with a feeling and create a symbol that causes that feeling in the audience, then repeat it with slight changes.

And every time you repeat the symbol, you “expand the ripples” in your audience’s mind “often without their being consciously aware of it.”

SYMBOL WEB

Truby reminds his readers not to see a character as “a single, unique individual” and similarly, the symbol shouldn’t be a single object.

(As a reminder: Truby means, not a single individual as in stands or falls on his own, but think about the character in relation to the character web).

Key Point: Always create a web of symbols in which each symbol helps define the others.

(I’ve seen this done in the Hunger Games series, which borrows heavily from ancient Roman symbolism)

Remember that “the character web shows a deeper truth about how the world works by comparing and contrasting people.” While plot “shows a deeper truth about how the world works through a sequence of actions with a surprising but powerful logic.

In the same way, the symbol web shows a deeper reality by “referrin objects, people, and actions to other objects/people/actions.”

(This is a good reminder that we humans are REALLY strong on comparisons and metaphors. Our entire learning process is predicated on comparing new things to old things we’ve seen before. The best writers are masters of metaphor and literary devices that make use of our pattern recognition and comparativity, if that’s a word ;D)

Truby gives an example, comparing the “serene forest world of Lothlorien to the terrifying mountain world of Mordor.”

STORY SYMBOLS

A symbol is supposed to express “the fundamental story twists, central theme, overall story structure” in one image. Truby gives some examples:

In The Odyssey, the long journey is the symbol.
In Huck Finn, the raft is the metaphor.
In the Scarlet Letter, the letter A is the symbol.
And so on.

To create your web of symbols, though, you first need a “single line” that can connect all the symbols, which should come out of your designing principle. Here Truby gives several examples. Here’s the Harry Potter one:

Designing principle: Magician prince learns to be a man and kin by attending a boarding school for sorcerors over the course of 7 schoo lyears.
Theme line: When you’re blessed with great talent / power, you must sacrifice for the good of others as a leader.
Story World: Wizard school in medieval castle.
Symbol line: Magical kingdom in the form of a school.

And this is the one for A Christmas Carol:

Designing principle: Trace a man’s rebirth by forcing him to see his past, present, and future over the course of one Christmas Eve.
Theme line: A person lives a happier life when he gives to others. (Reminds me of the verse: To give is better than to receive — Acts 20:35)
Story World: 19th c London counting house and different homes.
Symbol line: Ghosts from past, present, future.

SYMBOLIC CHARACTERS

If you want to apply symbolism to a character, pick something that “represents a defining principle of that character or its reverse.” When you connect a specific symbol to “an essential quality of the character,” the audience “gets an immediate understanding of one aspect of the character in a single blow. They also experience an emotion they associate from then on with that character.”

(Again, this reminds me of The Hunger Games. Each main character has a symbol. Katniss’ is the mockingjay, Peeta’s is bread, and Gale’s is hunting traps).

And don’t do this in isolation. Consider your character web. Consider coming up with symbols for many of the characters in your story, beginning with the hero and main opponent. Their symbols should also oppose each other.

You can also use two symbols for one character, creating symbol opposition WITHIN the character.

(Hunger Games is really on the mind. I can see where Katniss’ character does this — her two symbols are mockingjays and fire. Very opposite indeed, and brings out the main theme of her decision whether to let herself be consumed by hatred and revenge or to fight for life and goodness against an evil world.

(However, I wonder how well this applies to other stories. For a classic like Pride and Prejudice, for example, I’m not sure Lizzy and Darcy have symbols at all…is it necessary for all stories? Or just the modern ones?)

So here’s the process, laid out step by step:

Look at the character web
Begin with your hero and main opponent
Consider a single aspect of the character / emotion that you want the character to evoke in the reader
Consider applying symbol opposition within your character
Repeat the symbol in association with your character throughout the story
Every time you repeat, vary the details of the symbol

(Again, Hunger Games does this exactly: We have Katniss with her mockingjay pin, Katniss singing to the mockingjays as a signal, Katniss hanging out with Rue, the human embodiment of a little birdlike girl. Then we have Katniss in her multiple fire-related outfits, courtesy of Cinna, Katniss throwing Snow’s roses into the fire, Katniss literally being burned almost to death at the end of the book, and so on)

Truby suggests using categories of character, especially “gods, animals and machines.” because these categories “represent a fundamental way of being as well as a level of being.”

Some examples of good symbolism:

In The Godfather, Puzo is a vengeful, dictatorial god.
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Daedalus has the name of Daedalus, a mythological figure who built wings to escape the labyrinth. Stephen also has Icarus as a symbol, whose ambition killed him.
In The Matrix, Neo is compared to Jesus and so is Sydney Carton in Tale of Two Cities.

Animal symbolism examples:

Streetcar Named Desire: Stanley is a pig/bull/ape/wolf, Blanche is a moth/bird
Batman, Spider-man, Tarzan, Crocodile Dundee are fairly obvious over-the-top symbols

Machine symbolism examples:

Frankenstein: the monster is a kind of machine, because he’s manufactured.
There’s also The Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the Wizard of Oz’s Tin Man.

Another way to apply symbolism to characters is through their name. Think of Dickens with his Ebenezer Scrooge, Uriah Heep, Tiny Tim, and so on.

And one more “advanced technique” for symbolism in characterization is using a symbol to “help track the character change.” The point is to choose a symbol you want the character to become when he undergoes the change.

For example, Truby points out that in The Godfather, the opening scene has a man asking the current Godfather, Vito Corleone for a favor. The way Corleone grants the favor hints that he is some kind of devil figure, and the man has just made a Faustian bargain.

At the end of the story, Michael Corleone, the new Godfather, is literally at a baby’s christening, where part of the ritual has him “renounce Satan,” which is ironic, as he himself has symbolically become a devil/Satan and murderer.

So throughout the story you can see Michael growing into the symbol of the devil/Satan, but it’s done very subtly and brilliantly.

SYMBOLIC THEMES

You can also use symbols to “encapsulate entire moral arguments.” But this can be risky. If you do it too overtly, it will make your story sound preachy.

Truby cites The Scarlet Letter where the letter A represents both the moral argument against adultery and the “private morality” that Hester and her lover have.

And in The Great Gatsby, Truby arues that there are three symbols that represent America:

The green light represents modern America, which once had an American Dream but is now consumed by consumerism and appearances without substance.
The spectacles billboard in front of the dump represents present America as a garden eaten by a machine.
The “fresh green breast of the new world” at the end symbolizes the natural world of America, newly discovered and a “second chance at the Garden of Eden.”

SYMBOL FOR STORY WORLD

Refer to chapter 6’s discussion on world creating techniques, like the miniature. They are also symbolic.

But you can add more symbols to “heighten or change the meaning.”

Truby says one way to do this is to make the setting a bit magical, as in Harry Potter’s forest.

There’s also the matrix symbol in the movie, The Matrix, which suggests “a web of enslaving threads” showing readers they are “entering a complex world of many forces, some of which are hidden from view” and cueing them that “fun revelations are on the way.”

(That’s key to a great story or story-world. The convincing, the signalling, the marketing to readers that “fun revelations are on the way”!)

SYMBOLIC ACTIONS

Truby states: “Each action is a kind of car in the long train of the hero and opponent competing for the goal.”

But when you make an act symbolic, you make it stand out from the plot sequence. It “calls attention to itself.”

For example, at the end of Tale of Two Cities, Sydney Carlton sacrifices himself for Lucy like Christ does on the cross for his people, giving himself so others may live.

SYMBOLIC OBJECTS

A web of objects can create a “deep, complex pattern of meaning” that supports the theme. Again, go back to your designing principle, which is the glue that turns your objects into a meaningful cluster.

Certain genres have pretty established webs of symbolic objects. As in myth, horror, westerns.

In myths, you’ve got the gods, who are pretty symbolic. Then there are objects, but remember that “there is no fixed meaning — symbols are always ambiguous to some degree.”

In horror, religious symbols are big, specifically Christian symbolism in the American and European horror stories. Animals are often used, as in Dracula who can be a bat or wolf and lives with rats.

In westerns, there are also religious symbols, as well as horsemen, the six-gun, hats (white for the good guys, black for the bad), the star badge, and the fence.

But Truby warns that using a “prefabricated metaphorical symbol web” because it is “self-conscious and predictable.” So you can reverse the web, using all the same symbols but giving them different, unexpected meanings. Subvert audience expectations.

Truby wraps up this chapter with a few examples of symbol webs from stories like King Arthur, The Usual Suspects, Star Wars, Forrest Gump, etc.

And the assignments at the end of this chapter:

Look at your premise, theme, one-line description of story world and then “write a one-line description of the main symbols in your story.”
Come up with symbols for your hero and other characters, starting by looking at the character web.
Consider if there’s a symbol you can connect your hero’s character change to?
Is there a symbol that can encapsulate the theme of your story?
What about symbols in your world, actions, objects in your story?
Chart how each symbol you use changes over the course of the story.

Finally, Truby ends with a detailed analysis of symbols used in LoTR.

Quotes & Comments

First line(s): A lot of writers think of symbols as those pesky little things that were only important in lit class.

Last line(s): Study it [The Lord of the Rings] carefully to master many of the techniques of symbol-making.

This chapter was more interesting than the last one. Maybe a lot of that has to do with myself, however, than an objective assessment.
As someone who appreciates good symbolism, it was interesting to follow along with this chapter and brainstorm some preliminary symbolism ideas for my current work in progress.

Chapter 8 — Plot

In This Chapter

The definition of a real plot and what makes it work (and how it’s not the same thing as “story,” which is greater.
6 kinds of plots.
6 steps to create your own organic plot.
The 22 step story structure, laid out with descriptions of each step.

Finally, finally ~ we have arrived at the chapter on plot!

“Most writers,” Truby warns, “think they’ll just figure [plot] out when the time comes — which of course never happens.”

(Haha! That’s funny)

Plot is complex, detailed, yet has to work together “as a whole.” Which is why a simplistic “three act structure” plot technique can often fail miserably. If you’re only thinking about your story in terms of three acts, you’ll get stuck in second-act problems.

The problem, Truby says, is that people don’t understand what plot is. It’s not the same as story nor does it just “Track the actions of a hero going after his goal.”

Story is greater than plot. Truby defines plot as “under-the-surface weaving of various lines of action or sets of events so that the story builds steadily from the beginning through the middle to the end.” It tracks the “dance between the hero and all of his opponents as they fight for the same goal.”

Key Point: Your plot depends on how you withhold and reveal information…the masterful management of suspense and mystery…leading the reader through [a space] that is always full of signs to be read, but always menaced with misreading until the very end.

(This is an interesting point. It makes me think of Ender’s Game which was full of clever mini moments in how Ender fights in the games at Battle School against the teachers who keep throwing him curveballs…culminating in the climactic curveball where Ender unknowingly defeats the enemy aliens in what he thinks is a simulated fight.

(And the real final curveball is when he realizes at the same time that the aliens were not enemies, after all — that the war between the humans and aliens was based on a huge misunderstanding. Lots of genius moments in this book, for sure.)

ORGANIC PLOT

Plot isn’t just a simple sequence of events, because it has no purpose or “designing principle,” Truby argues. A good plot is organic, which means it has to show how the hero’s actions lead to character change (or not), each event is “causally connected,” essential, and actions are “proportionate in…length and pacing.”

Plots should “come naturally from the main character” rather than be imposed by the author, or it will feel mechanical, and the character will feel like a puppet or pawn.

A good plot should be so tight that no part can be displaced “without ruin to the whole,” as Edgar Allan Poe said.

PLOT TYPES

The two legs of each story, Truby says, are:

Taking action
Learning information

In early stories, the myth form showed characters taking heroic actions that the audience are inspired to mimic. Later plots using the detective form have a hero with an audience “ignorant or confused about what’s happening,” and the audience’s goal is to “determine the truth.”

Then Truby dives into 6 kinds of plots:

The Journey Plot: The hero goes on a journey where he encounters a succession of opponents and returns home. The problem is this plot tends to “fail to achieve its organic potential” as the hero “almost never undergoes even slight character change,” and the story is too meandering.
The Three Unities Plot: The next method was used by Greek dramatists. The idea is to make the plot take place in 24 hours, one location, and follow one action or story line. This type of story is more organic because “all actions come from the hero in a very short time of development.” Usually there is one big reveal at the end of the story (think Oedipus)
The Reveals Plot: In this plot, the hero tends to stay in one place (say, a town) over a longer time period, and a lot of things about the opponents are hidden from hero and audience, plus the opponents are very clever, so this plot has many revelations for hero and audience. The heyday for this plot type was the 19th century (think Count of Monte Cristo and Charles Dickens)
Antiplot: In the 20th century, serious fiction featured the antiplot (see Waiting for Godot, Ulysses, Catcher in the Rye), where “you see almost a disdain for plot,” and rather a focus on the subtleties of character.
Genre Plot: In movies and novels, genre plots are types of stories with predetermined characters, themes, symbols, plots, etc. Audiences tend to know what will happen in a genre story, so “only the particulars surprise them.” As Truby says, these plots are “literally generic, which means they are mechanical” meaning they’re not “unique to their particular main character.”
Multistrand Plot: The newest plot strategy started in dramatic TV, where each story (weekly episode) include 3–5 major plot strands driven by a separate character in a group. Done well, the strands are all variations on a theme, and emphasizes the minisociety/the group.

CREATING AN ORGANIC PLOT

So how do you create an organic plot yourself? Truby recommends:

Refer to your designing principle.
Remind yourself of your theme line, the moral argument you want to make, reduced to one line.
If you have a symbol line for your story, your plot should reflect that too.
Will you have a astoryteller for your plot?
Figure out the detailed structure of your plot, using the 22 structure steps (see next section)
Decide if you want your story to have one or more genres.

TWENTY-TWO-STEP STORY STRUCTURE

Truby says there are 22 building blocks, or crucial structure events or stages in an organic plot.

Chapter 3 covered the seven key structure steps, which come at the beginning and end of the story. The other 15 steps are for the middle of the story.

Together, these 22 steps help you create an organic plot and also rewrite that plot. The point is to give you the most dramatic way to tell your story. And the 22 steps are:

Self revelation, need, desire
Ghost and story world
Weakness and need
Inciting event
Desire
Ally or allies
Opponent and/or mystery
Fake-ally opponent
First revelation and decision: changed desire and motive
Plan
Opponent’s plan and main counterattack
Drive
Attack by ally
Apparent defeat
Second revelation and decision: Obsessive drive, changed desire and motive
Audience revelation
Third revelation and decision
Gate, gauntlet, visit to death
Battle
Self-revelation
Moral decision
New equilibrium

Truby counters the argument that having these steps may make a story too mechanic, by saying that trying to make the story up as you go will leave you with a mess.

The 22 steps are not a formula, but a scaffold. Also, you may not need exactly these 22 steps for your story, depending on type and length of the story. And all stories work through the steps in a different order.

So here are the steps, broken down

Steps 20, 3, 5: Self revelation, need, and desire are the frame that “gives you the structural ‘journey’ your hero will take.” You start with the revelation, then work backwards to figure out your character’s weakness and need and desire.
In Casablanca, Rick’s self-revelation is that he can’t stop fighting for freedom just because he’s been hurt by love. His psychological need is to overcome his bitterness toward Ilsa and to renew his faith in his ideals, and his moral need is to stop being selfish. His desire is to get Ilsa back, and his initial error is considering himself a “dead man, just marking time.”
Step 2: Ghost and story world. The ghost refers to the backstory, a past event that still haunts the hero now (like an internal opponent). The story world is where your hero lives, and it should be and expression of your hero’s weaknesses, needs, desires, obstacles.
In Casablanca, Rick’s haunted by the memory of Ilsa deserting him in Paris. And the story world is Casablanca, a desert outpost in North Africa filled with refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe. Rick owns a bar here, a “representation of [his] cynicism and selfishness.”
Step 3: Weakness and need. Remember weaknesses are psychological (the inner person is damaged) and moral (hurts someone else).
In Casablanca, Rick doesn’t appear to want or need anything, but his need is to stop his bitterness and selfishness.
Step 4: Inciting event should be a small step that connects need and desire. E: Ilsa and Laszlo enter Rick’s cafe.
Step 5: Desire is your hero’s particular goal. Ex: Rick wants Ilsa, also wants to hurt Ilsa, also want to help her and Laszlo get away…
Step 6: Ally or allies. Consider giving your ally a desire line of their own, but don’t make him more interesting than your MC.
Side note on subplot — the subplot should affect the hero’s main plot or cut it out.
Step 7: Opponent and/or mystery. Ask yourself what are the opponent’s values and how does it differ from the hero’s. You can create a hierarchy of opponents with different alliances
Step 8: Fake-ally opponent. These characters are inherently interesting/complex. Ex: Captain Renault in Casablanca.
Step 9: First revelation and decision: changed desire and motive. At this point in the story, the MC has to get new info that makes him go in a new direction. “In many ways, the quality of your plot come down to the quality of your revelations.” Each revelation should be stronger than the one before.
Step 10: Plan. The guidelines and strategies the hero uses to overcome his opponent and reach the goal. Don’t just let your MC play out the plan, that’s too predictable. The plan has to fail, to make the MC “dig deep and come up with a better strategy.”
Step 11: Opponent’s plan and main counterattack. The opponent needs to have a strategy, too. This is crucial, but many writers ignore it. You have to hide the ways the opponent attacks the hero so you get juicy reveals.
Step 12: Drive. This is the series of actions the hero does to defeat the opponent and win, beginning with the hero’s plan (step 10) to his defeat (step 14). Usually the opponent is too strong for the hero to the point where the hero starts “taking immoral steps”
Step 13: Attack by ally. As the hero loses to the opponent and gets desperate, his ally must confront him.
Step 14: Apparent defeat. 2/3 to 3/4 into the story, the hero has to suffer an explosive, devastating defeat. This is rock bottom for the hero. There should only be one defeat. Many setbacks, but only one defeat for the dramatic power.
Step 15: Second revelation and decision: Obsessive drive, changed desire and motive. After the defeat, the hero should have another major revelation that galvanizes the hero and has him change his desire and motive.
Step 16: Audience revelation. This is where the reader, not the hero, learns important info, usually the true identity of the fake-ally opponent.
Step 17: Third revelation and decision. The hero learns more about how to beat the opponent, and maybe learns about the fake-ally’s real ID if there is one.
Step 18: Gate, gauntlet, visit to death. As story pressure increases, the hero has to metaphorically go through a narrow gate or long gauntlet, visit “death” (like a psychological death) which spurs him to fight.
Step 19: Battle. The final conflict is the funnel point of the story where everything converges, and “the theme first explodes in the minds of the audience.”
Step 20: Self-revelation. The hero learns who he really is, and facing the truth either destroys him (Oedipus, King Lear) or make him better. The revelations should be sudden, shattering, and new. In the case of a “double reversal,” both hero and opponent should have a self-revelation.
Step 21: Moral decision. This is a revelation for the audience, not the hero. You don’t want to sound preachy, but see if you can “find a particular gesture or action that can have symbolic impact on the audience.”
Step 22: New equilibrium. Now the hero is at a higher or lower level.

REVELATIONS SEQUENCE

Truby recommends writers take some time to “separate the reveals from the rest of the plot and look at them as one unit.”

Keep this in mind:

Revelations should be logical
They must build in intensity (in general)
They must come at increasing pace

And the most powerful reveals are reversals, where “the audience’s understanding of everything in the story is turned on its head.” It’s most common in thrillers and detective stories, and is best placed near the end of the story.

(The example that comes immediately to my mind is Snape’s backstory with Lily in the Harry Potter series)

But be careful, it can turn your story into a “mere vehicle for plot.” O Henry, for example, did this a lot in his short stories, but he was criticized for being “gimmicky and mechanical.”

Truby advises creating a list of Revelations + Decisions/Desires/Motives to track through your story. For each revelation, how does it change the decision, desires, motive of the hero (or not?)

And this section includes several examples of this (not too strict structure, but just a basic idea for various stories).

THE STORY TELLER

Most stories don’t use a recognized storyteller, but a good storyteller, either 1st or 3rd person, can let you create more subtlety and complexity in your story. It allows you to play with voice.

Some suggestions Truby has:

Your storyteller is probably your true main character
Introduce your storyteller dramatically within the story
Find a good trigger to cause him to tell the story
He shouldn’t be a know it all at the start
Experiment with structures outside of simple chronology
Try different versions of telling the story as the teller struggles to tell the truth
End the storytelling frame 3/4 of the way in so that the act of telling the story can change the teller himself.
Telling the story should give the teller a self-revelation
Be wary of too many storytellers
And more (Some of the advice in this section is too specific and not particularly useful I think)

GENRES

Genre is a story form with predetermined plots. Truby says they are complex, and you want to commit to one or two to really master them.

He ends with a full breakdown of The Godfather to again demonstrate the 22 steps.

Quotes & Comments

First line(s): Plot is the most underestimated of all the major storytelling skills.

Last line(s): This man who once wanted nothing to do with the violence and crime of his family is now its leader and will kill anyone who betrays him or gets in his way. [The Godfather]

My main thought was: For a book with a subtitle about 22 steps, it sure took a long time (more than 50% of the book) to get to those 22 steps.
I’m also not sure that all 22 are essential. Some do feel a bit fluffy, but I will reserve judgment and try a few more out on my works in progress before saying.
One thing I’m a bit confused with is why “genres” and “storytellers” is shoved in like an afterthought at the end of this chapter.

Chapter 9 — Scene Weave

In This Chapter

What a scene is, definitionally.
How to create a scene weave, the last step before writing your story.
Types of scene weaves with examples from movies and TV.

This chapter is all about the scene weave (aka: scene list, scene outline, scene breakdown), the “final step before writing your full story or script.”

But first, what’s a scene? Truby says, generally it is “one action in one time and place.”

When you make a scene weave, you need to list only the “single essential action of each scene,” keeping the bullet to 1–2 lines. And next to the scene description, list any structure step accomplished in that scene (like “desire, plan, apparent defeat”).

Note that not all scenes will have these tags.

And be flexible, because as you start to write a scene, you will find some surprises.

Truby says that the average Hollywood movie has 40–70 scenes, but novels have twice that or a lot more, depending on genre.

And once you have your scene weave finish, do this to edit it:

Reorder scenes so the sequence of the story is right. Think structure, not chronology.
Combine scenes so each scene is packed but “accomplishes essentially one action.”
Cut/add scenes as needed. Trim fat. Remember that “story pacing has to do not only with the length of a scene but also with the choice of scenes.

Now, here’s a key point: pay attention to the JUXTAPOSITION of scenes.

As Truby says: “the juxtaposition of two scenes can be more important than what happens in any individual scene.”

(This reminds me of learning tonal languages. For these, you don’t just want to learn tones in isolation, you want to learn them in pairs, or sets. The context can help you clarify what any specific tone really is)

So when you look at scenes in a story, you want to look at the contrast of:

Content: How does the following scene comment on the previous scene?
Proportion & Pacing: Does the following scene have the right length and importance compared to the previous scene?

The important part is to keep your narrative mind always in mind.

Here, Truby includes some examples of crosscut scenes from The Godfather to show how effective contrast between scenes can be.

MULTISTRAND PLOT SCENE WEAVE

In TV, you’ll often find 3–5 major story lines woven into one over multiple episodes. How well the show does depends on how the plotlines are juxtaposed.

For example, in the ER episode “The Dance we Do” by Jack Orman, all five plots A) involve a character with a drug problem of one kind or another, and B) are related to the effects of lying versus telling the truth.

All five plots “funnel down to the most powerful revelation or self-revelation that the lead character and the plot are capable of.”

Here, Truby includes a table of the different scenes in the episode to show how the plots are woven together.

Then Truby gives an exercise for creating your own scene weave:

List every scene in your story in one sentence.
Tag all relevant scenes with whichever of the 22 structure steps it corresponds to
Order the scenes by structure, not chronology, and edit your weave to cut the fat

In this section, Truby gives a table showing the scene weave for L.A. Confidential, The Empire Strikes Back, Pride & Prejudice, and It’s a Wonderful Life.

For Empire Strikes Back, Truby points out that as a second movie in a trilogy, this movie “lacks the opening focus of the first episode, when the main character is introduced, and the closing focus of the third episode, when everything converges in the final battle.”

But the writer kept the story interesting using a crosscut strategy, juxtaposing hero Luke’s Jedi training (which would be long and boring on its own) with the adventures of Han, Leia, and Chewie escaping Darth Vader’s men.

And for Pride & Prejudice, Truby points out that there are five subplots (Elizabeth’s four sisters and friend Charlotte) in addition to her own story, which “gives the story tremendous density and texture” as the “little story moments for each of the minor characters…play off the same problem facing the main characters.”

Not to mention, having multiple subplots allows the writer to end the story with several marriages instead of just one, including one bad marriage.

Quotes & Comments

First line(s): Why are Jane Austen and Charles Dickens such great storytellers, still delighting audiences even in this high-tech, high-speed world?

Last line(s): Harry arrives. A bell rings, and George congratulates Clarence on winning his wings. New equilibrium, new community. [Analysis of It’s a Wonderful Life]

The bulk of this chapter was examples of scene weaves, diagrammed out for reference. It was useful.

Chapter 10 — Scene Construction and Symphonic Dialogue

In This Chapter

2 requirements for every good scene.
9 questions to ask yourself when constructing a scene.
3 major tracks happening simultaneously in most every scene.
10+ step scene-writing exercise.

Truby gives another definition of “scene” in this chapter: “One action in one time and place…a ministory”

Meaning, a scene needs 6 of the 7 structure steps (eschewing self-revelation in favor of a “twist, surprise, or reveal”)

CONSTRUCTING THE SCENE

When creating a scene, you need to do two things:

Determine how it fits into and furthers the hero’s overall development
Make it a good ministory

Some tips to consider with writing your scene:

The beginning of the scene “should frame what the whole scene is about”
Then the scene should “Funnel down to a single point, with the most important word or line of dialogue stated last.”
Ask yourself the questions:
1. Where does this scene fit in the hero’s development/character arc?
2. What problems must be solved or what goals must be accomplished?
3. What strategy will be used to solve the problems?
4. Which character’s desire drives this scene?
5. What’s the endpoint, and how will the desire resolve?
6. Who opposes the desire, and what are the characters fighting about?
7. What’s the character’s plan (direct — character says exactly what he wants, or indirect — pretending to want something while wanting something else) for reaching the goal?
8. Make the conflict build to a breaking point or solution
9. Use a twist or reveal (optional, and remember the reveal may not necessarily be true)

Don’t start the scene early and build toward the main conflict. Instead, start it as late as possible, or it will be boring.

COMPLEX OR SUBTEXT SCENES

Subtext scenes, Truby says, are based on the desire and plan. If characters have hidden desires that conflict, you get great conflict.

DIALOGUE

Don’t force your dialogue to “do the heavy lifting, the work that the story structure should do,” or your dialogue will sound “Stilted, forced, and phony.”

Dialogue, Truby points out, is not “real talk,” but “highly selective language that sounds like it could be real.”

In other words, it’s always “more intelligent…more metaphorical, and better argued than in real life.”

Think of dialogue like music. Like a symphony, it’s not a single melody but “three major tracks” happening simultaneously. These tracks are:

Story dialogue (melody): Story expressed through talk. Even though they say “actions speak louder than words,” Truby says “talk is a form of action.”
Moral dialogue (harmony): This is about values, and right/wrong actions. Truby writes: “moral dialogue is not about story events. It’s about the characters’ attitudes toward those events.”
Key words, phrases, taglines, sounds (repetition, variation, leitmotif): These words can carry special symbolic/thematic meaning.
Tagline: “a single line of dialogue that you repeat many times over the course of the story. every time you use it, it gains new meaning.” It’s good for expressing theme. Ex: “May the Force be with you.” “If you build it, they will come.” “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

SCENES

When writing an opening scene, consider that it’s the foundation of your character and story.

Here, Truby includes a few opening scene analyses from Butch Cassidy…, Pride & Prejudice, and David Copperfield, etc.

MASTERPIECES OF SCENE CONSTRUCTION

Remember, “Great drama is not the product of two individuals butting heads; it is the product of the values and ideas of the individuals going into battle.”

To illustrate this point, Truby cites the scene in It’s a Wonderful Life, where George Bailey is arguing with Mr. Potter about their different visions for Bedford Falls. What helps make the argument even stronger is that there is a scene before this, where George is arguing with his father about the same issue, and he gives the argument that Potter gives later, so this change in George’s position highlights the debate.

Now Truby gives a scene-writing exercise in 10+ steps.

First, before you start a scene, “state your hero’s character change in one line.” Now, ask yourself these questions:

Where’s the scene positioned on your hero’s arc, and how does this scene move him “ to the next step on his line of development”?
what problems must you solve and what must you accomplish in the scene?
What strategy will you use to do this?
Whose desire (MC or other person?) drives this scene?
What’s the endpoint of the character’s goal in this scene?
Who will oppose the MC’s goal?
What plan, indirect or direct, will the character use to accomplish his goal?
Will the scene end at the height of conflict or will there be some sort of solution?
Will there be a twist, surprise, or reveal in the scene?
Will one character end the scene by commenting on who another character is, deep down?

Then Truby advises writing dialogue by going through the phases of thinking how the dialogue contributes to the story, then how morality plays a role, then whether or not you want to add any key words, phrases, taglines, or sounds.

And finally, make sure each character speaks “in a unique way.”

Quotes & Comments

First line(s): Scenes are where the action is — literally.

Last line(s): Unique Voices Make sure that each character speaks in a unique way.

That last line was a bit sudden and not super-well connected.
Like most of the other chapters, there were a few jewels in this chapter, a good deal of fluff, and several examples.
The one most important thing I learned from this chapter that I found highly valuable was the idea of looking at the juxtaposition of scenes, and not just each scene in isolation. It reminds me of learning tone pairs for pronunciation in language learning.

Chapter 11 — The Never-Ending Story

In This Chapter

3 false endings you want to avoid.
What you really want the ending of your story to do.

Truby says that “a great story keeps on affecting the audience long after the first telling is over. It literally keeps on telling itself.”

Which is why your ending is important. You want to avoid 3 major false endings:

Premature: When the hero has a big insight too early, his development stops and “everything else is anticlimactic.” Or if the hero gets his desire too soon, a new desire would just mean starting a new story.
Arbitrary: If the hero takes an action that feels inorganic to his character, it “kicks the audience out of the story.”
Closed: The story just stops. Usually this is because the plot is inorganic. In real life, “desire never stops,. Equilibrium is temporary. The self-revelation is never simple, and it cannot guarantee the hero a satsifying life from that day forward.”

Remember that stories are organic and “the organic end is found in the beginning,” so a great story “always ends by signaling to the audience to go back to the beginning and experience it again.”

One simple way to do this, Truby says, is to “create an apparent equilibrium and then immediately shatter it with one more surprise.” For example, in The Sixth Sense, or The Usual Suspects, you have a paradigm-shifting reveal at the very end of the story.

However, this technique is “the most limited way of creating the never-ending story,” because once the surprise is revealed, it’s no longer surprising on a re-read.

The key is that desire never dies, and Truby gives some examples of how to end your story to create a “mobius strip” circle:

The hero fails to achieve his desire, and other characters come up with a new desire
Give a surprising character change to an opponent or minor character, so the audience can see the story again with that person as a true hero (Note: I wonder if Bean might count as this in the Ender’s Game series)
Put so many details in the background of the story world that people want to re-experience the story to take it all in
Make the moral argument more complex, so the audience has to reevaluate all the characters to figure out what really is the right thing to do.

Ultimately, Truby says, his goal with this book is to help people tell a “universally appealing story that is also totally original,” by showing readers “the dramatic code” — the ways humans “grown and change in a lifetime.”

He ends by saying “YOU are the never-ending story…face your own seven steps…do it every time you write a new story.”

And now, he suggests it is time to…(read the book again).

Quotes & Comments

First line(s): A great story lives forever. This is not a platitude or a tautology.

Last line(s): Now that you’ve read it once, let me suggest…well, you know what to do.

A bit obvious but mildly clever of Truby to end with the strongly-insinuated call-to-action to read his book again.
He only gets away with it because 1) it is true that the best stories are worth re-reading (more than once), and 2) his own book IS so dense that it does need a re-reading for people to really glean useful information and apply it so that it actually helps them.
However, he DOES make a really good point that you should make it your goal as a writer to write a book that readers will want to read again. Otherwise, what’s the point?

FINAL THOUGHTS

Why I Rated This Book 3.33 Stars

I use this criteria to rate every book (out of 6 points per category):

Star ratings:
1 star = Basically, trash. Or worse.
2 stars = Only worth it if you really like the topic.
3 stars = Average.
4 stars = Quite Good.
5 stars = Worth re-reading more than once.
6 stars = Life-changing.

3. Craft ✍ ✍ ✍

Is this work is well-written, and are the ideas clearly and skillfully presented?

Unfortunately, this book drags. It is dense, and it’s less than 500 pages, but the density is more due to xanthum gum filler than nutrient, if I may use a food metaphor.

It talks about many complex and somewhat-obscure ideas, but the ideas for me were not so revelatory, helpful, or insightful as, say, the ideas in Matthew Dicks’ Storyworthy.

There are only 11 chapters, but each chapter is a chonker. It bogs down a lot in chapter 6, particularly.

One of the dangers of trying to write a book about writing that applies to all of writing is that unless you can really Occam’s-Razor-it into the most useful, effective information, it can easily become bloated as you try to address too many things that may be relevant, say, to the writers of one genre and not writers of another.

I’m not so sure that all the information Truby presents in this book IS actually universally applicable, although some of it certainly is.

That said, he is able to write moderately clearly overall. But there are some places where the writing isn’t terribly clear because it seems like the thinking behind it isn’t terribly clear (see: the concept of the design principle).

2. Concept 📖📖📖📖

Is this an interesting concept, well-executed? (Are implicit and explicit promises paid off?)

This book is supposed to be a DOING book, designed to help readers actually create their own quality stories.

The general concept of the book was an enticing one: Experienced screenwriter shares secrets of storytelling success through a given number of practical steps.

The execution didn’t quite live up to the promise, however.

It does, on the surface — Truby promises 22 steps, and 22 steps you shall get.

But are all those steps all essential? The minimum viable necessary steps to storytelling success? And are the ideas, principles, and tips expressed clearly and practically in a way that the reader can understand and apply them to their own work immediately, to their story’s noticeable benefit?

Not exactly.

For one, the use of examples to illustrate ideas is too little in some places, and too much in others.

Then the idea of the “designing principle” is never very clear, and I think that’s because it’s not clear in the author’s own mind, which is why it’s not being communicated well.

There are a few worthwhile insights in the book, but mixed with a lot more not-so-useful thoughts. I get a few faint whiffs of the “emperor’s new clothes” effect in parts of the book (esp. re: the concept of the designing principle, as well as chapter 6, the world building chapter).

I think in general sometimes when you try to analyze something like storytelling too much, you end up analyzing it to death, just like dissecting a live frog kills it.

Analysis is useful only up to a point, but there’s also a bit of a leap of faith or magic in the creation of a really good story that can only come from practice and experience.

1. Core ❤️❤️❤️

Are the worldview, themes, and arguments of this work true, edifying, and worth learning?

One thing I agree with Truby on is that the purpose of story has to do with showing people right and wrong ways of being in the world. In other words, morality.

But I sense that Truby’s definition of “morality” is missing something. I agree that most of morality DOES have to do with how one interacts with other people, but that isn’t all.

There also is a kind of morality/immorality in how one thinks about and treats oneself (and no, I’m not talking about pop culture’s take on “self-love”), and one’s God.

And that is the part Truby is missing. His concept of morality seems a bit relative and vague, situated on shifting sands (subjective definitions of “harm”), which makes it not really a morality at all.

Because if there is an objective truth and rightness out there, that truth cannot be created from within individual imperfect people. It must be DISCOVERED, OUTSIDE of self, not fabricated from one’s personal feelings.

But Truby fails to say this, because this is not his worldview.

Instead, he leans way too heavily on Jungian ideas and the Hero’s Journey — which I’ve come to find suspect, the more I learn about who Carl Jung really was, is not true to reality. It may appear so, but in the same way that fool’s gold appears to be true gold, but if you look at it closely, it really isn’t.

I’m still formulating my ideas on this topic, but have come to believe that the hero’s journey is not quite as pivotal to good storytelling nor universal as many of its supporters like to think it is. It might even be the reverse.

That said, I do agree with Truby on his comments on the importance of thinking of the story as an organic whole, a web where a change in one element has repercussions on other elements, so you have to think of storytelling more holistically.

How to do that exactly is probably more of a subconscious skill than a conscious one, I’m coming to realize. Conscious learning can only take you so far. After that you need to actually write, study, critique, and create your own stories to learn from experience.

Writing Tips & Practical Application

Brainstorm symbols for your characters: At least for the main characters, try to brainstorm a specific symbol that could evoke the exact emotion you want readers to associate with him/her. See chapter 7 of this book.
Create your scene weave: And compare each scene to the one before and after it, in pairs, to see how the fit and juxtaposition works.

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