How to write
One thing that will always be true is that no matter how old you are you are never too young to learn something. This has been especially true for me this past month. You see, I was one of those kids who wrote stories and poems at five years old. I wrote my first story, literally when I was five. I wrote another in fifth grade, called Baby Adventures. Don’t worry, I won’t be publishing it. I don’t even remember what happened to it!
I have always been considered a talented writer and have always taken creative writing classes throughout school. I even did a bit of student journalism in high school.
But I came across a man that I feel I should have known but have only become acquainted with this month. His name is John Truby. This man is a master teacher when it comes to helping writers understand how story actually works. While I have always had an instinctual talent for storytelling no teacher or instructor truly helped me to understand how stories need to be put together, and what the rules are, even if you want to break them. You can’t break rules and be successful if you don’t know what they are. While some of the creative writing classes I took as a teen were fun and helpful in firing my imagination for writing more stories none of them actually delved into the mechanics of writing. Truby revealed something in several videos in which he is being interviewed, that many writers don’t understand; most writers don’t understand the genres they are writing in or how a story is supposed to work.
Truby was the teacher I wished I’d had when I was a young writer. He knows genre and story through and through and how to explain it easily. Listening to him I felt something click in my mind when it comes to the cursed Writer’s Block issue. Writer’s Block is not a psychological issue. It is a problem with the story mechanics.
The two times in my writing career that I suffered from Writer’s Block, both times coincided with either a major personal or family crisis. However, when I examined the issues I was having with the manuscripts, there were serious issues with the plot mechanics as well. Once I was able to get myself together mentally and emotionally, I could take a good look at what wasn’t working and make the needed changes. Those were the few times I ever really revised a story. In fact, I’m in the midst of one of those “times” right now. Future Fantastic is coming along nicely. When I work on it, I often get “in the zone”. I didn’t feel this at all nor did I have a good outline for it when I first started the first draft back in 2019. Writing “in the zone” is when you know the story is rocking!
John Truby has two books on story, The Anatomy of Story and The Anatomy of Genre and he also offers audio classes that you can buy and listen to on your own time. I have at least one right now, the class on Myth, and I’m getting another one soon. I think his books should be required reading for all writers. Had I heard of him decades ago I think my writing career would have blossomed. I would have gotten a better grip on story mechanics. As it is now, after forty years of writing and having written nearly twenty books since the advent of the indie publishing revolution, I think I have a good grip on how to write a decent story now and I have no interest in a traditional publishing deal. In fact, perhaps it’s a good thing that I couldn’t get published before. With indie publishing, I control the rights to all of my work and that’s just how I like it. So maybe Truby came just in time for me.
But any and all new and young writers need this man’s wisdom and tutelage. I will write more of my own thoughts on John Truby next week. One thing that is wholly new to me that he has mentioned is the idea of the female mono-myth. Most of us know the male mono-myth, which is the Warrior Myth. That is the archetypal path discussed in The Hero of a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell. I have that book and I always find it enlightening for ideas. Or just for understanding certain aspects of human culture. But there was a mono-story myth that came before but in a cultural sense was wiped out by war-like societies and that is the female mono-myth or what I will call the Heroine’s Journey. he says that this myth is distinctly different from the male version that most people are already familiar with. Truby gives an example of the female mono-myth in The Wizard of Oz.
I used something close to this in my Secret Doorway Tales series without even realizing it. More to come on this subject. Until then happy writing!
