Consider this quote from Richard Flanagan’s novel First Person (2018). Scam artist “Ziggy” Heidl explains the reason for his success: 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.” —Larry Wilson, co-writer /co-producer of Beetljuice and co-writer of The Addams Family 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 The earliest hunter-gatherer societies understood the tremendous importance of story in their everyday lives. But as societies developed agriculture and technology advanced, a different mindset began to take over. Human lives became dominated by the work required to eat, and later to turn a profit. Once people started living in large enough groups, religions formed to give people ethical guidelines for how to live together. Stories were considered a means to that end.

Problem/Need - The problem is what the character is dealing with as the story opens. The need comes from the character's weaknesses. The weakness is something that is ruining the character's life. The need comes out of the weakness. The weakness/need is the wellspring of the story. The problem is that many of us can’t just conjure life-changing emotional depth out of thin air. We may need to write our way into it. Maybe, like Lucinda Williams, we don’t even recognize we’ve created it until someone else points it out. 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.For the rest of us, there is this book, which walks us through things like the steps that every story needs to have in it so a reader can connect to it. It helps us understand WHY we need to show the opponent's plan, even if we're focused on the hero's desires, because that's how we build the story. This book helps us understand how to map the relationships of characters in simple and complex webs, so that everyone we introduce to our audience has a reason to be there, and an internal logic that supports the story as a whole. I read this while I was working on my first novel, and I ended up taking six months off from my writing process, because I was learning so much from this book and I wanted to be able to use that knowledge while I was finishing the first draft. I can unequivocally state that this book make all the difference for me, and helped me take a bunch of ideas and scenes and assemble them into a proper _story_. And it does all of this not just through lectures, but by showing us how classic and popular works of fiction, literature, and film use the 22 steps to form their stories. This was obviously a Fantasy in outer space, which meant elements of Science Fiction. But that wasn’t all. I loved the classic Western, but it had long since died. Now I was seeing all the Western beats in outer space. It was wild! And who doesn’t love King Arthur, one of the great Myth stories? I noticed some of those beats as well.

I'm 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 what's 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 don't need to do that in movies, novels, and short stories or even, for that matter, in many contemporary plays. Surely, this is where the expression “blown away” was born. Yes, I was watching Star Wars for the first time. And while it played, the strangest thing happened. I experienced a feeling of pure delight. In 95 percent of stories, I could predict what would happen three beats ahead. But not with Star Wars. Here was one story beat after another I didn’t see coming. This was nonstop excitement. A comprehensive guide to writing stories of all kinds, Truby's tome is invaluable to any writer looking to put an idea to paper." -- Booklist Genres are far more than types of stories. They are the all-stars of the story world that have achieved immense popular success over centuries. Writers who want to succeed professionally must write the stories the business wants to buy. Simply put, the storytelling game is won by mastering the structure of genres.Solid state physics Quantum theory Chemical bonds SCIENCE Physics Condensed Matter Física do estado sólido Mecânica quântica 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.

The author comes across as smug and narrow-minded because he fails to give good and varied examples, while constantly portraying himself as clever. I think this book does more harm than good when it comes to giving advice. 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 doesn't 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 audience's essential life too.Each of the various genres—Detective, Love, Fantasy, and the like—is a unique window onto how a particular aspect of the world works and how best to confront it. Writers have a unique perspective because it’s their job to think in terms of different worlds and deeper structures. If they want to write stories that will achieve critical and popular success, they need to consider elements such as morality and point of view. Morality refers to how a character’s actions affect others. That’s why, in the Crime chapter, we discuss the moral code of both the hero and their opponent. While all stories require a point of view, the Detective genre explores the way this fact variously limits and empowers the human mind.