This is the second part of a two-part interview with film guru John Truby. You can read the first part here.
The sequence of genres could be arranged along Aristotle’s narrative arc, from the early basic challenge of survival to the ultimate development of the heart.
In my mind Aristotle is probably the greatest philosopher in history. Yeah, he was wrong about certain scientific things. But no philosopher contributed more important work in every major category of philosophy. He begins with metaphysics, with the process of becoming. And that’s what a story is.
My gripe with Aristotle’s Poetics is that it doesn’t give enough practical steps about how to tell a story. That’s one of the reasons I wrote The Anatomy of Story. And that’s why I wrote The Anatomy of Genres—to give writers the detailed, specific techniques they need to write a professional-level story.
We are not only a storytelling species, but also a summarizing, synthesizing, simplifying species. So one of the challenges of being a good storyteller is avoiding too many summary statements and describing specific people, places, and events in detail.
Yeah, it is. In my writing workshops, students often say, “Well, generally, this is going to happen.” But that’s not going to cut it. You need very specific actions. If you’re writing a Detective story, you’ve got to have a very specific clue that gives you a very specific reveal and then you’ve got to build on that. A great story is a series of causal links. You’ve got to be specific about what each person is doing at each moment.
Imagine how bad The Godfather would be if Mario Puzo said, “There was a big wedding in the family and a good time was had by all as Don Corleone did some business on the side.”
Exactly. And that’s the way most writers would do it. And that’s why you’ve got to be so precise in the sequence of actions you put in the story.
In any genre, there are 15 to 20 major plot beats unique to that form. They must be in that story or you’re not doing your job and the reader will be very unhappy with you. Plot is the most challenging thing for writers because they think in terms of individual moments in the story. No, it’s all about stringing together a sequence of events—which are driven by the opponent.
How do you do that?
Start with the opponent’s plan to defeat the hero. That might be the most important technique for creating a plot.
Take the Love genre. Realistically, a love story should take about 10 minutes. You’ve got two people who are attracted to each other. The rest is negotiation. But for a movie, it’s got to last at least 90 minutes. So how do you do that? Start with the opponent—and in a love story, the main opponent is the object of desire.
Back to the importance of action—lots and lots of beats. How do all these beats hang together?
Each individual beat means nothing without being part of 15 to 20 other beats. The beats in all the genres have been worked out in great detail over decades, sometimes centuries or even thousands of years. So you need to know the sequence of 15 to 20 beats for the genre you’re writing in.
But the real key is how you transcend the genres. Otherwise, you’re telling the same story that everybody else in that genre is telling. You’ve got to tell your story in a unique way.
How do you do that?
It means executing the individual beats in a way that we haven’t seen before. More importantly, it means expressing the life philosophy through the plot beats. And that’s the area where writers go wrong. The most underestimated element of storytelling is theme. Writers are terrified of theme. They’ve heard the old rule that if you want to send a message send it Western Union. So, to avoid hitting the theme on the nose they avoid theme entirely. It’s one of the biggest mistakes you can make. You need to express theme under the surface, through the structure, through the plot beats. If you’re not expressing the life philosophy of that genre, you’re getting one-tenth of the power of your story.
Genre is often described as a promise to the reader. When you pick up a Western, you can rest assured that you will get all the elements that have always made you enjoy a Western. Likewise, the character’s expression of a life philosophy is another kind of promise.
That’s the promise that most writers don’t know. They know that genre is a plot system. What they don’t know is that it’s also a theme system. The challenge is to express the theme through a complex plot.
Are there some tricks to express the theme with action? Let’s try an example. Imagine a couple of friends playing pickup basketball and one of them is overly aggressive and the other one is focused on style. And the aggressive guy beats the style guy and says, “See, that’s your problem, you were too concerned about strutting around, so you lost.” So in this case, you could build the theme into the action and dialogue.
Yeah, but the dialogue should be minimal. The theme should be expressed through the action and structure. And that brings us to another point, which is that one of the ways you transcend the genre is to mix genres. You need to combine two, three, even four genres. Each genre has 15 to 25 plot beats. When you combine that with two or three genres, you separate yourself from the rest of the crowd.
If you just mashed together three genres, that could be a mess—and disorienting. Somehow, you need to control your use of the different genre beats.
If you don’t know how to mix genres, you get story chaos. That’s why you have to choose one genre to be the primary form. That provides your structure—your hero, your main opponent, the key desire line, and so on.
Then you grab the beats from the other genres and mix them in—but only when they work with the main genre. If the minor genres come into conflict with the main genre—and many do, since they’re different approaches to handling the same problem—you stick with the plot beat of the major genre.
So your main genre is your North Star. You use the other genre beats when they strengthen the thrust of the main genre.
Exactly. And there are a lot of things that determine the main thrust of your story. But the most important one is the hero’s goal. And so whatever you can attach to that spine, to that goal, you want to use that.
Can you give an example of a great story that uses a major genre but is also supported by other genres?
In The Godfather, Mario Puzo combined Gangster with Fairy Tale and Myth. It’s actually three story forms blended together, with the structure revolving around the father and his three sons. That’s a Fairy Tale technique: the three sons. Each son has a different set of traits and characteristics. You see how each one responds and only the third one has the right combination of traits to be a successful godfather. If you were writing a typical gangster story, you’re not going to come up with The Godfather. It’s unique to Mario Puzo.
Francis Ford Coppola could not have created a movie like The Godfather without the massive level of detail in the novel. The worst writing mistakes get made—the worst cliches happen, the worst stretches of boredom happen—when you don’t have enough raw materials. You need a pile of details and moments and possibilities to create a great story.
That’s why Hollywood prefers to start with a novel, because it’s a lot easier to condense a novel and get a really dense plot in a film. When we think of The Godfather book, people think of it as just pulp fiction. No, this is a great book. This thing is brilliant. And I have learned so many lessons of storytelling from reading that book and watching that film.
You’ve got to have specific details at every level of the story. Only when you have those kind of details can you then sequence them together into an overall story, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Many writers simply do not understand the connection between the detail level and the master scheme level.
Movies do something that no other art form can do, which is they get us out of the utter wordiness of life. We have the tendency anyway to overly simplify things. Images get us to be in the moment.
Images are obviously central to modern storytelling. But one of my bugaboos is the idea that that film is a visual medium. Yeah, it is. We see a screen with images. But that’s not what people respond to. Film is a story medium. This is why I find the idea of the auteur theory one of the dumbest things ever. No, film is created by the writer. It’s the writer creating the character, the plot, the structure, the theme, the symbols, the dialogue, all the stuff that the audience is responding to.
If film was just a visual medium, we should say that silent film is the greatest film we’ve ever seen. But there’s a real advantage to talk. That’s why talkies got to be so popular so fast. People also say, well, you got to express ideas visually. Yeah, well, that’s true of any story: “show don’t tell.”
Look at Casablanca. If we were judging it based on the visuals, we would say that thing’s terrible. But it has probably the greatest dialogue in the history of film. When people say a picture is worth a thousand words, I always say a word is worth a thousand pictures. Words are what give you texture. Words are how we know that that person is a unique from everyone else.
Truman Capote once said that “all literature is gossip.” People are whispering about somebody else, often in a very judgmental and a prurient way, in secret. In that sense, the best stories feel like eavesdropping. You weren’t supposed to see Don Corleone in that room—that’s a private thing and you weren’t invited. You often say that stories are portals into different worlds, where you have no business being.
Right, the portal gets us past the public facade. Stories are about the private, where people have the most painful moments and experiences with each other. This is something we don’t talk about in public because it’s often painful and embarrassing. But that’s what stories allow us to do.
We all have secrets. Because they’re secrets, we don’t want anybody else to know what they are. But stories can get at them. If stories were only about what people do in public, they would really be boring. So in a way, the best way to think of stories is they capture the things that nobody else wants to let you see.
Given the importance of the detective story, is there an ideal detective?
The model for the detective, and the most brilliant of all detectives, is of course Sherlock Holmes. He is one of the most influential, if not the most influential, character in modern storytelling.
But there’s no way I’m going to be able to meet somebody for the first time and know that he was in Afghanistan and that he’s a doctor, et cetera. So in terms of the detective’s fact-finding mission, is there another one? I was I was going to say Woodward and Bernstein …
Sherlock Holmes works from the ground up. It’s not just that he’s a genius. It’s his observations that help to solve the case.
Observations about the dog that didn’t bark in the night.
Right. Sherlock Holmes is the master of starting with the facts, starting with the clues, with the specific physical evidence, and then slowly but surely generating a larger theory, a larger story of what truly happened. And that is the methodology. We need to use methodology to get away from these divisive ideologies. Too many are so trapped by their own ideology, they can’t see basic facts.
And looking is a very hard thing to do. Most of what I see, I’m actually constructing in my brain, based on my experiences and my predictions.
Absolutely right. One of the things that was so fun about writing the detective chapter was to look at all the things that prevent us from being able to see ourselves because of the ideology that we’ve created since childhood. Our stories allow us to see only certain things. Humans are pattern-making animals. But it amazes me how often the pattern people put together is complete nonsense.
