While I'm not planning on attempting to write a screenplay anytime soon, I really enjoyed John Truby's The Anatomy of a Story. Its lessons on story-structure are great for those who write any form of narrative, including fiction, although they're focused more on screenwriting and his examples are taken from the screenwriting world. I read this book originally as a "craft" book so I could think about narrative story structure, but in the end I came away with a new appreciation for a good film script. And I'll never look at Tootsie the same way again after reading the way Truby analyzes the script. (And I mean that in a good way.)
While Truby is famous for his 22-step structure for story-construction, what I found particularly useful in the book was the way he looked at character webs and story worlds. The insights he brings about using each character to illustrate the protagonist's main conflict and using the world of the story (settings, props etc) to back that up, is so helpful both in thinking about writing, as well as in simply reading/analyzing a book or movie. Reading Truby has helped me see how creators achieve or fail to achieve levels of meaning in their work through elements of character, plot and setting external to the main protagonist. While it's obviously a "craft book", it's also of general interest to readers and movie-goers who may be interested in how creators of these works enrich our experiences through careful design of all the story elements.
While Truby is famous for his 22-step structure for story-construction, what I found particularly useful in the book was the way he looked at character webs and story worlds. The insights he brings about using each character to illustrate the protagonist's main conflict and using the world of the story (settings, props etc) to back that up, is so helpful both in thinking about writing, as well as in simply reading/analyzing a book or movie. Reading Truby has helped me see how creators achieve or fail to achieve levels of meaning in their work through elements of character, plot and setting external to the main protagonist. While it's obviously a "craft book", it's also of general interest to readers and movie-goers who may be interested in how creators of these works enrich our experiences through careful design of all the story elements.
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