The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller
John Truby
Language: English
Pages: 464
ISBN: 0865479933
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"If you're ready to graduate from the boy-meets-girl league of screenwriting, meet John Truby . . . [his lessons inspire] epiphanies that make you see the contours of your psyche as sharply as your script."
―LA Weekly
John Truby is one of the most respected and sought-after story consultants in the film industry, and his students have gone on to pen some of Hollywood's most successful films, including Sleepless in Seattle, Scream, and Shrek. The Anatomy of Story is his long-awaited first book, and it shares all his secrets for writing a compelling script. Based on the lessons in his award-winning class, Great Screenwriting, The Anatomy of Story draws on a broad range of philosophy and mythology, offering fresh techniques and insightful anecdotes alongside Truby's own unique approach to building an effective, multifaceted narrative.
roommate and lover. • Decision Nick decides to go with Gus to confront Beth. • Changed Desire Nick still wants to solve the murders, but now he’s certain Beth is the killer. • Changed Motive Unchanged. Notice with the detective thriller, the revelations get bigger and closer to home. “THEME OF THE TRAITOR AND THE HERO” (by Jorge Luis Borges, 1956) Borges is a rare example of a writer who has great reveals, even in very short stories, but they don’t dominate the story at the expense of
the writers to use the middle story to expand the trilogy to the widest possible scope, in this case, the universe. But they still have to keep narrative drive. And that’s made even trickier by the fact that this is a middle episode of a trilogy that must somehow stand on its own. The crosscut’s deepest capability is to compare content, by juxtaposing characters or lines of action. That doesn’t happen here. But the film does take advantage of the plot capabilities of the crosscut, which are to
sense of something coming to fruition or playing itself out. A classic example of this is the end of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain tracks Huck’s development, but the journey plot he uses literally paints Huck into a corner. He is forced to rely on coincidence and deus ex machina to end the story, disappointing those who find the rest of the story so brilliant. The most common false ending is the closed ending. The hero accomplishes his goal, gains a simple self-revelation, and exists in
world using three of the four major building blocks—natural settings, artificial spaces, and technology—that make up the story world, with an emphasis on what these spaces and forms inherently or typically mean to an audience. 4. Next, we’ll connect the story world to your hero’s overall development and apply the fourth major building block of the story world, time. 5. Finally, we’ll track the detailed development of the story world through the story structure by creating a visual seven steps.
But finally Molly is the woman of “yes.” The sense that Bloom and Molly’s love may be reborn is found in her thought that this morning she will fix her husband breakfast and serve him eggs, and in her memory of Bloom when, deeply in love, she agreed to be his wife and fed him “seedcake.” In this grand circular journey ending back home, there is the hint that a “remarriage” between Bloom and Molly might just occur. CREATING THE STORY WORLD—WRITING EXERCISE 5 • Story World in One Line Use the