The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller by John Truby (E

Description: The Anatomy of Story by John Truby One of the most respected and sought-after story consultants in the film industry delivers his long-awaited first book, and shares all of his secrets for writing a compelling script. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description "If youre 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 Hollywoods 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 Trubys own unique approach to building an effective, multifaceted narrative. Author Biography John Truby is the founder and director of Trubys Writers Studio. Over the past thirty years, he has taught more than fifty thousand students worldwide, including novelists, screenwriters, and TV writers. Together, these writers have generated more than fifteen billion dollars at the box office. Truby has an ongoing program where he works with students who are actively creating shows, movies, and novel series. He regularly applies his genre techniques in story consulting work with major studios including Disney, Sony Pictures, Fox, HBO, the BBC, Canal Plus, Globo, and AMC. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Leslie, and their two cats, Tink and Peanut. Review "Truby attempts to inform the entire story, addressing plot, character, tone, symbolism, and dialog. The key here is to grow a script organically rather than force the story into preexisting mechanics . . . Highly recommended." --Library Journal "A comprehensive guide to writing stories of all kinds, Trubys tome is invaluable to any writer looking to put an idea to paper." --Booklist "The Anatomy Of Story is concrete and practical without resorting to simplistic Three Act Structure screenwriting clichés. It will be an indispensable guide to writing your first great script. Then, the perfect survival manual to help you negotiate the often confusing, contradictory and cutthroat world of professional screenwriting." --Larry Wilson, co-writer /co-producer of BEETLEJUICE and co-writer of THE ADDAMS FAMILY "A veritable bible for screenwriters." --Backstage "If youre ready to graduate from the boy-meets-girl league of screenwriting, meet John Truby . . . [His lessons draw] epiphanies that make you see the contours of your psyche as sharply as your script." --LA Weekly Review Quote "Truby attempts to inform the entire story, addressing plot, character, tone, symbolism, and dialog. The key here is to grow a script organically rather than force the story into preexisting mechanics . . . Highly recommended." -- Library Journal "A comprehensive guide to writing stories of all kinds, Trubys tome is invaluable to any writer looking to put an idea to paper." -- Booklist " The Anatomy Of Story is concrete and practical without resorting to simplistic Three Act Structure screenwriting clichs. It will be an indispensable guide to writing your first great script. Then, the perfect survival manual to help you negotiate the often confusing, contradictory and cutthroat world of professional screenwriting." -- Larry Wilson, co-writer /co-producer of BEETLEJUICE and co-writer of THE ADDAMS FAMILY "A veritable bible for screenwriters." -- Backstage "If youre ready to graduate from the boy-meets-girl league of screenwriting, meet John Truby . . . [His lessons draw] epiphanies that make you see the contours of your psyche as sharply as your script." -- LA Weekly Excerpt from Book The Anatomy of Story CHAPTER 1 Story Space, Story Time E VERYONE CAN TELL a story. We do it every day. "You wont believe what happened at work." Or "Guess what I just did!" Or "A guy goes into a bar ..." We see, hear, read, and tell thousands of stories in our lives. The problem comes in telling a great story. If you want to become a master storyteller, and maybe even get paid to be one, you run up against tremendous obstacles. For one thing, showing the how and why of human life is a monumental job. You have to have a deep and precise understanding of the biggest, most complex subject there is. And then you have to be able to translate your understanding into a story. For most writers, that may be the biggest challenge of all. I want to be specific about the obstacles of story technique because thats the only way a writer can hope to overcome them. The first obstacle is the common terminology most writers use to think about story. Terms like "rising action," "climax," "progressive complication," and "denouement," terms that go as far back as Aristotle, are so broad and theoretical as to be almost meaningless. Lets be honest: they have no practical value for storytellers. Say you are writing a scene where your hero is hanging by his fingertips, seconds from falling to his death. Is that a progressive complication, a rising action, a denouement, or the opening scene of thestory? It may be none of them or all of them, but in any event, these terms dont tell you how to write the scene or whether to write it at all. The classic story terms suggest an even bigger obstacle to good technique: the very idea of what story is and how it works. As a storyteller in training, the first thing you probably did was read Aristotles Poetics . I believe Aristotle was the greatest philosopher in history. But his thinking about story, while powerful, is surprisingly narrow, focused on a limited number of plots and genres. It is also extremely theoretical and difficult to put into actual practice, which is why most storytellers trying to learn the practical techniques of their craft from Aristotle leave empty-handed. If you are a screenwriter, you probably moved from Aristotle to a much simpler understanding of story called "three-act structure." This is also problematic, because three-act structure, albeit a lot easier to understand than Aristotle, is hopelessly simplistic and in many ways just plain wrong. Three-act theory says that every story for the screen has three "acts": the first act is the beginning, the second is the middle, and the third is the end. The first act is about thirty pages long. The third act is also about thirty pages long. And the second act runs to around sixty pages. And this three-act story supposedly has two or three "plot points" (whatever those are). Got that? Great. Now go and write a professional script. Im simplifying this theory of story, but not by much. It should be obvious that such an elementary approach has even less practical value than Aristotle. But whats worse is that it promotes a view of story that is mechanical. The idea of an act break comes from the conventions of traditional theater, where we close the curtain to signal the end of an act. We dont need to do that in movies, novels, and short stories or even, for that matter, in many contemporary plays. In short, act breaks are external to the story. Three-act structure is a mechanical device superimposed on the story and has nothing to do with its internal logic--where the story should or should not go. A mechanical view of story, like three-act theory, inevitably leads to episodic storytelling. An episodic story is a collection of pieces, like parts stored in a box. Events in the story stand out as discrete elements and dont connect or build steadily from beginning to end. The result is a story that moves the audience sporadically, if at all. Another obstacle to mastering storytelling has to do with the writingprocess. Just as many writers have a mechanical view of what a story is, they use a mechanical process for creating one. This is especially true of screenwriters whose mistaken notions of what makes a script salable lead them to write a script that is neither popular nor good. Screenwriters typically come up with a story idea that is a slight variation on a movie they saw six months previously. Then they apply a genre, like "detective," "love," or "action," and fill in the characters and plot beats (story events) that go with that form. The result: a hopelessly generic, formulaic story devoid of originality. In this book, I want to show you a better way. My goal is to explain how a great story works, along with the techniques needed to create one, so that you will have the best chance of writing a great story of your own. Some would argue that its impossible to teach someone how to tell a great story. I believe it can be done, but it requires that we think and talk about story differently than in the past. In simplest terms, Im going to lay out a practical poetics for storytellers that works whether youre writing a screenplay, a novel, a play, a teleplay, or a short story. I will Show that a great story is organic--not a machine but a living body that develops Treat storytelling as an exacting craft with precise techniques that will help you be successful, regardless of the medium or genre you choose Work through a writing process that is also organic, meaning that we will develop characters and plot that grow naturally out of your original story idea The main challenge facing any storyteller is overcoming the contradiction between the first and second of these tasks. You construct a story from hundreds, even thousands, of elements using a vast array of techniques. Yet the story must feel organic to the audience; it must seem like a single thing that grows and builds to a climax. If you want to become a great storyteller, you have to master this technique to such a high degree that your characters seem to be acting on their own, as they must, even though you are the one making them act that way. In this sense we storytellers are a lot like athletes. A great athlete makes everything look easy, as though his body just naturally moves that way. 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 Lets begin the process simply, with a one-line definition of a story: A speaker tells a listener what someone did to get what he wanted and why. Notice we have three distinct elements: the teller, the listener, and the story that is told. The storyteller is first and foremost someone who plays . Stories are verbal games the author plays with the audience (they keep no score--the studios, networks, and publishing houses do that). The storyteller makes up characters and actions. He tells what happened, laying out a set of actions that have been completed in some way. Even if he tells the story in the present tense (as in playwriting or screenwriting), the storyteller is summing up all the events, so the listener feels that this is a single unit, the full story. But telling a story is not simply making up or remembering past events. Events are just descriptive. The storyteller is really selecting, connecting, and building a series of intense moments. These moments are so charged that the listener feels he is living them himself. Good storytelling doesnt just tell audiences what happened in a life. It gives them the experience of that life. It is the essential life, just the crucial thoughts and events, but it is conveyed with such freshness and newness that it feels part of the audiences essential life too. Good storytelling lets the audience relive events in the present so they can understand the forces, choices, and emotions that led the character to do what he did. 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. As a creator of verbal games that let the audience relive a life, the storyteller is constructing a kind of puzzle about people and asking the listener to figure it out. The author creates this puzzle in two major ways: he tells the audience certain information about a made-up character, and he withholds certain information. Withholding, or hiding, information is crucial to the storytellers make-believe. It forces the audience to figure out who the character is and what he is doing and so draws the audience into the story. When the audience no longer has to figure out the story, it ceases being an audience, and the story stops. Audiences love both the feeling part (reliving the life) and the thinking part (figuring out the puzzle) of a story. Every good story has both. But you can see story forms that go to one extreme or the other, from sentimental melodrama to the most cerebral detective story. THE STORY There have been thousands, if not millions, of stories. So what makes each of them a story? What do all stories do? What is the storyteller both revealing to and hiding from the audience? KEY POINT: All stories are a form of communication that expresses the dramatic code. The dramatic code, embedded deep in the human psyche, is an artistic description of how a person can grow or evolve. This code is also a process going on undernea Details ISBN0865479933 Author John Truby Short Title ANATOMY OF STORY Language English ISBN-10 0865479933 ISBN-13 9780865479937 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 372.677 Illustrations Yes Year 2008 Birth 1952 Subtitle 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller Imprint North Point Press Place of Publication Berkeley, California Country of Publication United States DOI 10.1604/9780865479937 UK Release Date 2008-10-14 Translated from English Pages 464 Publisher North Point Press Audience General AU Release Date 2009-01-29 NZ Release Date 2009-01-29 Publication Date 2008-10-01 US Release Date 2008-10-01 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:43674732;

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