John Truby Archive
Today, I powered through a draft of the back cover copy for my novel, updated with the new positive action and elimination of the trope-for-trope’s-sake character. This time, I also studied the sales copy on Amazon of my comp books, …
After working out my series premise and the the premise line for book 1, I analyzed it following the methodology in John Truby’s Anatomy of Story. I looked for what the audience expectations would be, what the potential challenges of …
I was continuing to work on my series premise and overarching considerations today and finally landed on an explanation that gives my hero positive action as well as stakes that go beyond herself. Better, I even managed to condense it …
In addition to the primary action of this story, which involves my hero’s flight from danger to safety, she is also going through the emotional journey of accepting her power. For the purpose of creating my scene outline, I am …
Today, I started trying to map specific events in my story to the 22 plot steps from Truby’s Anatomy of Story. I have multiple storylines going on in this book, but for now, I’m working on the hero’s core journey …
After finishing my primary characters yesterday, I’m starting my plot work today. But at the same time, I’m really struggling with how to do this. I think one of the reasons my last book didn’t work was because I tried …
Today, I sat down to try to start shaping my antagonist, but before I could get to the character profile, I ended up having to do a little geopolitical work. Since this is an epic fantasy, ultimately, the fate of …
Today, I went back over the premise work from yesterday, finishing the Truby evaluation of my character’s change and final moral decision, then went to work on describing my hero. When I wrote my last stories, I thought that each …
Starting today, I am working on a new book idea from scratch. After several trunked novels (and many lessons learned along the way about what went wrong with my stories), I am committed to finishing this one. This is going …