Truby Quotes

#1. I'm big on story structure. I studied with John Truby, who mapped out story by means of moral wants and needs, and that's what I do. Hey, so does John Irving.

Caroline Leavitt

#2. Everything was bathed in the white, unreal light of the moon, the yard like the wet bottom of a sea from which the water has just been suddenly removed.

Haruki Murakami

#3. Reality shows are usually created by people doing and saying stupid things.

Billy Bob Thornton

#4. The multistrand plot is clearly a much more simultaneous form of storytelling, emphasizing the group, or the minisociety, and how the characters compare.

John Truby

#5. If we are ever going to dwell in the house of the Lord, I believe, we do so now. If any house is divinely made, it is this one here, this great whirling mansion of planets and stars.

Scott Russell Sanders

#6. 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.

John Truby

#7. The best way to stop a bad habit is never to begin it.

James Cash Penney

#8. In the vast majority of stories, a character with weaknesses struggles to achieve something and ends up changed (positively or negatively) as a result.

John Truby

#9. Poetry is the connecting link between body and mind.

Camille Paglia

#10. He has been greatly missed since his retirement ... Thank God for videotapes and DVDs. In this regard, he will always be around.

David Letterman

#11. 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.

John Truby

#12. To empathize with someone means to care about and understand him. That's why the trick to keeping the audience's interest in a character, even when the character is not likable or is taking immoral actions, is to show the audience the hero's motive.

John Truby

#13. I finished 'American Born Chinese' in 2005, so after that, I started actively researching the Boxer Rebellion.

Gene Luen Yang

#14. Irish lace, hanging in the windows, filters the afternoon light, softening the lines on her face.

Christina Baker Kline

#15. Desire never stops. Equilibrium is temporary. The self-revelation is never simple, and it cannot guarantee the hero a satisfying life from that day forward. since a great story is always a living thing, its ending is no more final and certain than any other part of the story.

John Truby

#16. Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars. I will not forget thy word. Amen.

Blaise Pascal

#17. The story world isn't a copy of life as it is. It's life as human beings imagine it could be. It is human life condensed and heightened so that the audience can gain a better understanding of how life itself works.

John Truby

#18. 1.7% increase in terms of success rate a year, its nothing. By the time we get to the 24 century we might have effective treatments, Star Trek will be long gone by that time.

Ralph W. Moss

#19. Whereas, once again, the machine destroyed everything: you were killed discreetly, with a little shame and with great precision.

Albert Camus

#20. Step 1: Write Something That May Change Your Life

John Truby

#21. Audiences love both the feeling part (reliving the life) and the thinking part (figuring out the puzzle) of a story. Every good story has both.

John Truby

#22. Good storytelling lets the audience relive events in the present so they can understand the forces, choices, and emotions that led the character to do what he did.

John Truby

#23. Clearly she was expected to say something, but panic at having to speak stole the thoughts from her head.

Shannon Hale