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How I use John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story to Outline Fiction, Part Five
Or: The Final Outline (The fifth of five posts)
(This is the fifth 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.)
By the time I get to the outline phase in a novel, round about Chapter Eight of Truby or so, I’ve already got a thick notebook of what I’ve discovered by working with him. Here’s what I know:
My premise- what my novel is “about,” specifically what its moral argument is, and how every moment/character in the novel works in consort with that argument
My characters- their weaknesses, their desires (what they think they want), their needs (what they need to learn), how they work in connection with all the other characters in the novel, and much more.
