John Truby's book The Anatomy of Story is a mixed bag for me. On the one hand, it's helped me to think harder about my current story than anything else I've ever looked at. On the other side of it, though, the book had a paradoxical way of being too vaguely specific--or, maybe, too specifically vague--to help me out.
The problems first: I like movies well enough, but there's no way that I'd call myself a connoisseur of cinema. I've heard of plenty of "great" movies, but I haven't even seen Citizen Kane. The result is that this book--which is more for screenwriters than novelists anyway--is drawing off of examples I don't understand. While Truby tries to make up for this with quick explanations of each part of the film he's dissecting, it nevertheless leaves me lacking the nuance and intuition that his explanations rely upon. This isn't that he's picked esoteric or unusual films. It's A Wonderful Life, The Godfather, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Tootsie are well known and well regarded, and they provide the spine of the majority of his analyses. They're also older films (even when he wrote the book, back in 2007, these weren't considered the freshest crop of Hollywood), and since they don't have superheroes in them, I'm less inclined to want to see them. Yeah, that's definitely a snobbery-of-ignorance kind of statement, but it's also a true one. Anyway, therein lies the rub, for me: His break down of the story (into twenty-two, impossible to remember steps) is best illustrated in a way that I don't instantly understand. There were entire swaths of examples that I simply skipped because I didn't know the film and couldn't quite picture what he was trying to get me to see. Any time he brought up, say, The Lord of the Rings, I could suddenly and instantly understand his point. When it was Goodfellas, I was lost. That's what makes this book a mixed bag. There's a lot of really solid story structure advice in there, but it was hard to parse out from the examples he shared. Some things were really clear and understandable--the four-point motivation web that I mentioned back in October, for instance--and I thought that his argument in favor of an author-intended symbolism web was brilliant. I also appreciated the rigor with which he was analyzing each story. I haven't seen a text sliced so many ways since I was in college. Those were the moments where the book started to make sense. Those were the parts that I marked with a pencil for future reference--and I marked a lot of pages. I mean, I'm in the middle stages of outlining my cabin-retreat book, and I have written more about the story than I've ever done for a book before. I've world built, of course--thousands of words of world building go into almost every book I write--but this is story building. In the past, I would come up with an idea, rattle it around in my head, jot it down on notecards, and go from there. The process would be, at maximum, three hours of work. Then I'd go through the part that I actually like, which is the writing itself. Once that was finished, I'd leave the book alone for a long while, read it, feel depressed that I made so many errors, and move on to a new book instead of revising what I'd written. This time, in part because I've yet to be truly excited about any story up until now, I have dumped time into this story. I've written out notecards, discarded them the next day, jotted notes in my notebook, typed up stuff in my WikiDPad story bible, and drawn out maps. I have character relationship webs, discarded character motivations, and a page filled with symbolism that I want to see in the book. I've done all of this work because each time I read something else in Truby's book, I wanted to see if I could apply it. So that's what gets me: Good advice, thoughtful advice, useful advice, but clumsily written. I mean, his writing is fine. It doesn't thud and it doesn't sparkle (though he uses "literally" incorrectly). It's there. What's clumsy is the schema he's using. As I mentioned before, he has twenty-two steps for a story, but they're…strange. I don't know how else to explain how I reacted, save that it felt like it was unnecessarily complicated. The seven steps for a character arc made sense, but the fact that it felt as though it was spiraling out of his control by the end made me feel unimpressed. Obviously, I'm not saying that what he thinks isn't worthwhile to some people. He's made a career out of writing movies and story-doctoring. He knows what he's talking about. But his method isn't as useful to me as it could be for some people. And that's the way it's gotta be for a book of advice: Find what works for you and use it. Let the rest go. So that's what I'm doing with The Anatomy of Story. I'm using what I can where I can and being happy with that. Comments are closed.
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