I feel that I’m on some sort of a quest. I could have published a novel or poetry collection years ago, but in a sense, I feel that would only limit me, because like in The Serpent, to publish something means that you are giving up on what it could have been. I know that Walt Whitman changed ‘Leaves of Grass’ repeatedly and there are writers and poets that obsessively work on their creation even after it’s finished but still this is not the point.
John Truby’s The Anatomy of a Story is the first book that made me feel like I am a true story teller and that I can be a master storyteller no matter which vessel I use to tell my tale. The book pinpoints principals that one might say are driven from the world of script-writing such as ‘premise’ but are still true to everyone and anyone who tells a story.
Truby is very encouraging and covers everything: structure, characters, moral argument (which you probably know I think is highly important), scene, dialogue, symbols, and plot. He also gives key points that need to be defined like “the most important step in creating your hero, as well as all other characters is to connect and compare each to the other”. This is golden advice because our characters are sometimes just a state of mind (for instance we create a character to represent generosity or madness) but sometimes you want them to be contradictory, as in real life, where people are much more complicated and surprising. I highly recommend this book as it is written by an expert and it explains storytelling on a large scale and multiple genres. No wonder people see it as ‘The Bible of Telling Stories’.