Analyzing: John Truby's The Anatomy of Story Part 1 -- The Premise, The Designing Principle
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- Опубліковано 16 лют 2016
- Here I take a look and explanation at the Premise, Designing Principle, the Two Legs of a Story, and what you should be thinking about before writing.
Check it out on Amazon: amzn.to/2AEPzKk - Ігри
Plot twist: the guy who spends his time doing videogame plot analysis is actually devishly handsome
he really is lol
+IAmDaDumb1 He is The One... and he's Canadian. Makes sense, eh?
Smudboy, I must say. I've learned a ton about creating good stories over the two years I've been subscribed to you. From your Bioware game analysis to the Writers Corner videos. I'm still a very young writer but in the process of writing a story at the moment (98 pages so far). It's improved so much as I've listened to your videos. Thanks for being that one unusual You Tuber that doesn't do the same ol' crap.
I'm glad you touched on the designing principle concept, because it wasn't easy to understand when I read it from the book. But you explained really well and in a very relatable way. So thank you!
Great video and great hair!
I like the presentation format. Looking forward to more Anatomy of the Story analysis. Hopefully it ends up being a nice series.
Was practising storytelling and saw you tweet this. Thanks, dude; it helped me clean up some of my notes just now.
The way I always think of it is that stories are the same as the written assignments you get to do during every school throughout your life. There's introduction, taxonomy (expository, analysis, perspective): the body text and a conclusion. The reason that is, is because it's a formula for exploring and analysing and that's what a story will want to do. A story has an idea, a main conflict and main theme and it uses whatever means it can (same as research in assignments) to create exposition (context), explore the issue (analysis) and perspectivate it (reflection) and a conclusion that ties it all up with wrap and bow. Similar to a conclusion the introduction is best written when the entire body of the work is clear and done because your intro has to somehow establish what we're going to see and learn. It has to prepare us for the show.
One of the better examples I would have of literature or storytelling doing this is the book/movie Contact from 1997. It does have some contrivances and perhaps some other works of art convey their message without making it as obvious, but to me that movie is textbook.
When you make these aside storytelling videos, I get real excited that you could be a really popular UA-cam analyst, and that would be awesome (y)
Good video! I have only one thing to add: The premise line is not the same as the log line. It should be more of a working tool, it's very malleable. Of course, this is also about semantics 🤗
09:05 I really love the way you showed how to extend the premise into the designing principle. The example I often use is the movie RUSH: The life story of two of the best race car drivers in history - told like a race.
+smudboy
I'm happy to see you've read this book smudboy, I remember mentioning it to you a while back. I've read it twice now and it has practically become my bible when it comes to writing.
I look forward to your future videos with respects to this book, particularly on Truby's take on symbolism as I found that chapter to be the most convoluted. Its sort of ambiguous or 'open ended' in its definition... if that makes sense.
I love this kind of conversation. It's fantastic.
Glad I found this. It was really helpful.
Have to ask: will you be touching upon how this regards writing a story for a game or incorporating narrative into gameplay?
+Bobby90 That would probably be a different series. This is just storytelling in general. How to weave a narrative into a medium would have to be its own subject and would be vastly different between games, books, movies, tv, comics. Hopefully he'll have a bunch of different sub series for all the topics that can be built on top of this.
Yo now I understand why Gaider likes dudes. You're handsome as fuuuuuck man.
Great explanation of the suject, I will keep an eye on this while I'm writing :)
I just read it. I like McKee's _Story_ and Bookers' _Seven Basic Plots_ too. But _Anatomy of Story_ is good. Definitely worth the read and worth doing the exercises.
Have you written anything? If so, how can I read it?
hmmm "going to the mall" is not a premise. It has to have at least two stages and a plotpoint, like your Star Wars premise. 1) Skywalker is tied to his family on the farm. 2) (Plotpoint 1) his family is killed by the evil dude (or his minions) 3) Skywalker is seeking revenge. Sorry I have'nt seen your other videos, you might tell it there :) good stuff though
Imagine Smudboy with a Dorian mustache mmmmmm....
+MassEffectReaper ...Ugh...Dorian's moustache. Now, a Lemmy Kilmeister moustache on the other hand.
Lol!
so quick question for anyone/everyone, is the Antatomy of Story available on the Google store? I actually am working on writing myself, right now as a hobby but I am considering using what I write to turn into a small book series.
Just to give a bit of background, I have drawn a lot of inspiration from the Witcher series in general (the game trilogy's writing is nearly on par of that as the books), Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity and a bunch of other fantasy inspiration to kinda create my own fictional world while trying to write in good and fleshed out characters. So far, I have a few but the big problem I mainly have is how large the world I kinda envision is and sometimes I think I'm adding too many characters, guilds/Orders, countries etc. (and this is medieval fantasy so I have been trying to create a fictional yet somewhat realistic and grounded world similar to the witcher yet unique and different) and while of course, this is just something I am currently brainstorming and coming up with ideas so I'll probably cut some things out and add things etc. But either way I think this sounds like just the thing I need to help me write an actual story with all I've written down that can be continuous and structured.
+TheDarkSider
I highly recommend you do pick up John's book even if it is unavailable on the google store. I've read it twice now and find it helps immensely when writing. Its one of those book that when you read it you realize just how little you know about writing and how much better your stories can be.
Thank you. Good luck with your ideas. I’m sure you have way more though…😊
Smudboy: Become Tunnel Snake
Just a quick question(I'm a bit a novice when it comes to storytelling): Does there always have to be an antagonist in every story? should there always have to be SOMEONE to challenge the protagonist?Can't there be a SOMETHING that can motivate the protagonist the same way that a person can?
+Souji Q Almost all fiction boils down to a conflict between two forces. You need an antagonist if you want conflict, and you usually want conflict because that's what drives characters to act. Without will characters become stale and boring and you don't have a story anymore (search for "story seminar adaptation" on UA-cam.)
With that said an antagonist doesn't need to be a someone. Disaster movies such as The Impossible do this a lot. "Antagonist" is a term you use to identify the main thing which is directly opposed to what the protagonist wants to achieve. That can be tidal waves, Sauron, the Combine, an internal struggle, you name it.
What Mornegroth said. I think that Extra Credits did a good job on describing antagonists (yes, yes. They’re garbage now, but they used to be good, once upon a time)
I think what you really mean to ask is “does every story need a villain?” Because some people conflate “villain” with “antagonist,” and they’re not the same thing. And the answer is no, not every story needs a villain. But, every story needs an antagonist element, whether it be a person, a thing, or even the character themselves. Because it is possible for a character to be both protagonist and antagonist within the same story.
Are you young David Lynch?
Generally I would avoid these "How to" writing books, especially by those who have yet to prove themselves as a writer or at least as a serious literary critic, and the only thing I can find about Truby is he wrote a few episodes of 21 Jump Street. In my experience these books simply prescribe a catch-all formula and rules on how to turn out a bunch of similar stories for sale in the marketplace, not necessarily artful literature. The most helpful things I find in teaching yourself how to write well is to actually find the literary essays of great authors and/or the author's whose work you best like. For example (for myself) the Essays of Graham Greene, Borges, Faulkner. As well as the works of the great literary critics, classic and contemporary: Dryden, Aristotle, Samuel Johnson, Hitchens, James Wood.
+WilliamGarland i, too, have found excellent suggestions from the essays and short stories of the greats (Chekhov, Hemingway, Nabokov, etc.) But Truby's understanding of the screenplay, or novel, rings true. Many of the observations and understandings line up nearly perfectly with my own. The best thing about these rules is knowing how to break them!
The problem that I find with most of these books, and what I've read of Trudy, is that they tend to steer writers away from more experimental methods and works. Following any of these methods I could hardly imagine producing the works I find most interesting: the Sound and the Fury, Absalom! Absalom!, Ulysses, the Wasteland, the stories of Borges and Kafka, etc.
A common problem is that the human mind is pattern seeking, so that when we find art we like or dislike we try to attribute hard and fast rules to establish what makes it good or bad, whereas I tend to find a work "quality" is often more esoteric. For example, Graham Greene himself often writes novels and stories with rather straightforward and easy to understand plots, but what makes him a genius is his ability to understand the often contradictory and imperfect nature of the human psyche and to portray in all its intricacies that in the span of 200 pages. For me at least, no matter how many rules you establish for your plots, what will truly make or break a writer, is how well you understand your own minds and those of those around you: the classical pathos.
Comments like this always blow my mind. There are players, and there are coaches. Did Lombardi play pro football? I can't find anything to say he did. Think of writing book authors like coaches; some are great, some aren't. Don't think of them as other writers telling you how they did it. Stephen King's book on writing is useful, but hardly the final word on the subject, despite his lifelong success.
Sports are not like writing, particularly since there is a clear separation in sports of physical prowess and mental strategy; if you are a good writer you are a good writer, you do not then need a army of hulking meatmen to handle the actual writing of your book. Studying most great authors of the last several centuries you will not find them relying on "writing coaches" to teach them their technique, but rather studying the great authors of the past and learning from them how to write, imitating first and then developing their own style. These "how to" books are more of a recent phenomenon corresponding with drastic commodification of fiction in the last two centuries, in which we are to learn a ready-made formula to produce good fiction, though this actually means "marketable" fiction.
WilliamGarland There’s more than a bit of merit in your argument, but it’s also worth noting that not everyone learns through the method you prescribe, so Truby’s work and others of his ilk might be of immense value to the people who have trouble “getting it.” And while this can happen, to suggest that the only thing that can come of reading these books is soulless commodity culture dreck is too pre-emptively dismissive. Good writing can come from anywhere, even books that propose a formula on how to write well.
Again, not saying you’re entirely wrong, because you’re not. But I wouldn’t say that your method is the preferred one, either, because some people won’t learn that way.
THIS IS A DEEPFAKE VIDEO (trust me bro)
I like his How To Become A Serial Killer channel better
Its so hard to hear you.
I'm not really getting the importance of the premise. Is it supposed to be your skeleton or foundation, to build off of and direct the rest of the work, is that the value? It's all I can think of, but then, how is such a shallow, one-line summary supposed to guide a whole story? Just to make sure you don't wind up writing a rape revenge story when you started with a light-hearted family story? Star Wars has a really boring, tired premise, but a great story, while I very frequently see great, exciting premises with shitty stories, so I'm just not seeing how it's really that important. Obviously you need SOMETHING, or else you'll just be writing random nonsense, but how is it more than just some general concept?
+Bill Jacobs Think of the premise is the foundation of a story. From the premise we should ask (well, everything) but most importantly, "who is my main character going to fight"? The premise also establishes, or provides insight, into what kind of genre the story will use. This tells the writer where to start thinking of how to present their protagonist and their plot. The majority of writers fail at the premise, and end up using the wrong genre, incorrect expression or use of genre, or don't have the understanding of how to combine genres (or various dramatic elements.)
The plot is the spine of a story -- or the character want -- which is also the goal, which the entire story should hinge upon (the two legs of a story -- action and learning, on how to achieve that goal.) So you might start off with a simple premise like "a tale of a man learning quantum mechanics." But what kind of genre will that use? (Science fiction? A romance? An action adventure? A slice of life? A combination?) The premise has to be interesting enough, and original enough, to allow a unique method of expression (the designing principle.) "a man deals with the death of their father, and in the process learns, about the pauli exclusion principle, from the guy who invented it."
+Bill Jacobs
The premise is also important for marketing purposes. Its the one sentence that sums of your entire story, it doesn't have to tell the reader or the publisher what happens in its entirety but just a rough description of what this story is about.
If you pick up a book and turn it over to see what its about, if it has a boring or overused premise then the chances are you'll not buy or read it, and publisher is less likely to invest in your idea.
+Bill Jacobs Think not of the premise as the skeleton or foundation or structure. It's everything but. As a matter of fact, your job as a writer is to develop your structure from the premise. The premise really is any "flash", any inspiration about a component of story. It may be about a character, a plot beat, a setting, or a piece of dialogue. Truby's view on premise is that you should state it explicitly in about one sentence and it should contain a good sense of your main character, his basic action throughout the story as well as a sense of the central conflict. Most importantly, the premise is both your source of information and your prison. You must dig it's gold in order to develop it into a complete precise structure while respecting it's logical constraints. It is the simplest, albeit elusive, expression of your story. It is the beginning of your development process and your journey as a writer.You ask: "how is it more than just some general concept?" It's nothing but a general concept. The thing is, there are still some techniques which, from experience, let you see the dramatic potential of your premise.
Most amateur writers will tell you that all premises are created equal. They think that the execution is all that matter. According to Truby, not so. You have to develop your ability to spot your premise's weaknesses and change them at the premise stage, so you don't carry the inherent structural problems with you when they become harder to change.
Agreed.