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

Or: How Does It Work? (The second of five posts)

Photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash

(This is the second 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.)

Truby posits that good films (and he gives plenty of convincing examples) include most, if not all, of what he calls the “22 building blocks,” essential elements that keep a story strong. Truby is structured so that if you follow it from chapter one, by the end of it, you’ll have a detailed “scene weave” in hand (see: my trusty cork board), which he describes as “a list of every scene you believe will be in the final story,” based upon these 22 building blocks. Now…