The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller

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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. Seven Key Story Structure Steps The seven key story structure steps are the major stages of your story's development and of the dramaticcode hidden under its surface. Think of the seven structure steps as your story's DNA. Determining the seven key steps will give your story a solid, stable foundation. KEY POINT: Each subsystem of the story consists of a web of elements that help define and differentiate the other elements. KEY POINT: The fourteen major genres in this book, alone or in combination, compose 99 percent of storytelling forms today, including novels, film, television, plays, and video games. I made it up. Every day, just like you. Like a writer … What do you think a businessman is? A politician? They’re sorcerers—they make things up. Stories are all that we have to hold us together. Religion, science, money—they’re all just stories.

Ever wonder where all those ever-popular lightsabers came from? They’re from the samurai movie, a subgenre of Action. Since college, I’d been a big fan of Japanese films like Seven Samurai and The Hidden Fortress. Politics uses story to exercise power. Adlai Stevenson once observed, “In classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, ‘How well he spoke’—but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said, ‘Let us march.’”2 Turning words into action is the central distinction in communication. 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 underneath every story. The storyteller hides this process beneath particular characters and actions. But the code of growth is what the audience ultimately takes from a good story.

"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."

The Anatomy of Story book has been translated into multiple languages and is available in many different countries. The book has been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Dutch, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Book Editions

All the things we thought were bigger than story, like morality, culture, society, religion, sports, and war, are simply different kinds of stories. We humans are essentially storytelling animals.

The book starts by discussing the three essential ingredients in every story: character, action, and setting. The author then goes on to discuss the different ways these ingredients can be used to create different types of stories.

Once a character has a desire, the story "walks" on two "legs": acting and learning. A character pursuing a desire takes actions to get what he wants, and he learns new information about better ways to get it. Whenever he learns new information, he makes a decision and changes his course of action. This is an extraordinarily useful guide to understanding why and how stories work. Some writers are just naturally able to know what needs to happen in a story. They innately know what beat needs to happen, when it needs to happen, and -- most importantly -- WHY it needs to happen. These writers make the rest of us look bad, and make us feel like we have no idea what we're doing. At work, we need to tell a compelling story to drum up business. A good story can determine whether we can pay the rent.

Summary

A great story describes human beings going through an organic process. But it is also a living body unto itself. Even the simplest children's story is made up of many parts, or subsystems, that connect with and feed off one another. Just as the human body is made up of the nervous system, the circulatory system, the skeleton, and so on, a story is made of subsystems like the characters, the plot, the revelations sequence, the story world, the moral argument, the symbol web, the scene weave, and symphonic dialogue (all of which will be explained in upcoming chapters). Most writers don't use the best process for creating a story. They use the easiest one. We could describe it in four words: external, mechanical, piecemeal, generic. Of course, there are lots of variations on this process, but they all work something like this. Mastering one genre used to be enough. No longer. The problem with that strategy is that there are few stories today limited to a single form. Instead, most stories are a combination of two, three, or even four genres.

The beginning is all about introducing the reader to the characters and the world they inhabit. The middle is where things start to go wrong for the characters and they must struggle to overcome obstacles. The end is where everything comes to a resolution, either good or bad. Details of The Anatomy of Story Book Book 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.This is the essence of the hero's journey, which is a common narrative structure found in many stories. By showing the audience what the hero wants and the obstacles he must overcome to get it, the story creates a sense of tension and conflict that keeps the audience engaged. The meandering story follows a winding path without apparent direction. In nature, the meander is the form of rivers, snakes, and the brain: The book consists of eleven chapters. The first sets up the idea of story and how stories work. The second chapter is about the premise of the story, the one-line idea that shapes the happenings of the story. Chapter three describes seven key steps of story, the seven are added to / expounded upon to develop the aforementioned 22 steps. The seven steps are: 1.) weakness & need, 2.) desire, 3.) opponent, 4.) plan, 5.) battle, 6.) self-revelation, 7.) new equilibrium. 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 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.