How I Use John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story to Outline Fiction, Part One

Or: Who Is this Guy? (The first of five posts)

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

(This is the first of five posts that first appeared on the Bittersweet Book Launch blog — a project with my marketing manager at the time, Dan Blank, where we documented our marketing efforts for my novel Bittersweet for the year around publication. The series of Truby posts went up in 2014, talking about how I’ve adapted Truby’s screenwriting bible, The Anatomy of Story, for writing fiction — and I’m reposting it here on Medium because I often get asked about how to outline, and I love the idea of these musings from the past helping a new group of writers — and probably me too.)

Behold, the outline to my next book:

Since posting this image a few days ago, I’ve had a few fiction writer friends ask me how I ended up with just an overt outline. It looks very definitive up there, doesn’t it? Like I know what I’m doing or something (ha!). The truth is, thanks to a book called The Anatomy of Story, by a script-guru named John Truby, I actually do know a lot more what the next book is shaped like than I did only two weeks ago. Two…