Okay, so when I am working on a story and I need time to think and mull over a story without feeling unproductive, I turn to my craft books. I love all the old stand-bys. Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V. Swain, Donald Maass and his Writing the Breakout Novel and accompanying workbook. One I discovered last year in my constant search of the bookshelves at Borders was The Anatomy of Story by John Truby.

Storytelling is story telling whether it’s for a novel, a movie or a TV show. Some things just translate across all the barriers. So, though he writes for screenwriters and uses movies as examples, like many writing books, I love his “organic” style of considering a story and all its facets without it seeming so external.

What I really like is how his 22 steps of story telling fall in line with the 12 steps of the hero’s journey, only he puts more  emphasis on that one big section that so many people give one name to and leave it wide open. Step 6, Act II, Tests, Allies and Enemies, The Sagging Middle.

I once tried to get more insight from a poor author who tried her best to explain to me that’s where you apply all you’ve built on your characters and plot and play with it a bit and end up with a building tension to approaching your inmost cave. She tried. Very sincerely, she tried.

I like that TAS has a few more things to consider that works with the hero’s journey but is really more character based and has you considering theme, story world, setting, character webs and all that without it being a what’s next deal so you really work all around the story, considering every angle so when you write it, it comes  out richer.

Of course, I still have questions, but that’s for another day.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 1:04 am and is filed under Thoughts on Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.