The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller

Drama is a code of maturity. The focal point is the moment of change, the impact, when a person breaks free of habits and weaknesses and ghosts from his past and transforms to a richer and fuller self.

Any character who goes after a desire and is impeded is forced to struggle (otherwise the story is over). And that struggle makes him change. So the ultimate goal of the dramatic code, and of the storyteller, is to present a change in a character or to illustrate why that change did not occur.

Withholding, or hiding, information is crucial to the storyteller’s make-believe. It forces the audience to figure out who the character is and what he is doing and so draws the audience into the story. When the audience no longer has to figure out the story, it ceases being an audience, and the story stops.

KEY POINT: Your hero’s true desire is what he wants in this story, not what he wants in life.

Meandering Story

No individual element in your story, including the hero, will work unless you first create it and define it in relation to all the other elements.

society or show the precise mental and emotional processes leading up to his change.

Even when a character is wrong, he is wrong more eloquently than in real life.

Serious novels typically depict how a person interacts and changes within an entire