John Truby Quotes & Sayings

time. Take a lot of it at the beginning of the writing process. I'm not talking about hours or even days. I'm talking about weeks. Don't make the amateurish mistake of getting a hot premise and immediately running off to write scenes. You'll get twenty to thirty pages into the story and run into a dead end you can't escape. — John Truby

The multistrand plot is clearly a much more simultaneous form of storytelling, emphasizing the group, or the minisociety, and how the characters compare. — John Truby

No individual element in your story, including the hero, will work unless you first create it and define it in relation to all the other elements. — John Truby

To empathize with someone means to care about and understand him. That's why the trick to keeping the audience's interest in a character, even when the character is not likable or is taking immoral actions, is to show the audience the hero's motive. — John Truby

Subplot is not one of the twenty-two steps because it's not usually present and because it is really a plot of its own with its own structure. But it's a great technique. It improves the character, theme, and texture of your story. On the other hand, it slows the desire line - the narrative drive. So you have to decide what is most important to you. — John Truby

Any character who goes after a desire and is impeded is forced to struggle (otherwise the story is over.) And that struggle makes him change. So the ultimate goal of the dramatic code, and of the storyteller, is to present a change in a character or to illustrate why that change did not occur. — John Truby

In the vast majority of stories, a character with weaknesses struggles to achieve something and ends up changed (positively or negatively) as a result. — John Truby

The story world isn't a copy of life as it is. It's life as human beings imagine it could be. It is human life condensed and heightened so that the audience can gain a better understanding of how life itself works. — John Truby

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. — John Truby

Step 1: Write Something That May Change Your Life — John Truby

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. — John Truby

Desire never stops. Equilibrium is temporary. The self-revelation is never simple, and it cannot guarantee the hero a satisfying life from that day forward. since a great story is always a living thing, its ending is no more final and certain than any other part of the story. — John Truby