 Hello, my name is Jackie and welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, I'm an aspiring writer, and I'm going to attempt to do Nanarimo for the second time this year. If you are not new here, you'll know that I've created a little bit of a tradition of doing three different plotting methods for three different book ideas before I start any new project. So because I'd like to start a new project for Nanarimo, I'm going to be doing the same thing now. The first plotting, outlining, prep method I'm going to try is John Truby's Anatomy of Story, and I'm a little bit worried that I've been off more than I can chew because there is a lot in this book. In fact, at the time of filming this intro, I haven't actually finished reading it yet. I'm what a third of the way through, and already I feel like my brain isn't big enough to not only contain all of this information, but to actually process this information and use it to create a good book. So if you're not familiar with the Anatomy of Story, it's almost like the Bible of storytelling, and it's told from a screenwriting perspective, but because it's about stories and writers who are writing books tell stories, just as writers who are writing screenplays tell stories, so it's also relevant for aspiring novelists like myself. The different topics it covers are premise, story structure, character, moral argument, story world, symbol web, plot, scene weave, scene construction and symphonic dialogue, and the last chapter is the never ending story. I'm assuming that's a conclusion. All of this adds up to 22 steps for telling good stories. Now I was familiar with the Anatomy of Story because a lot of different writing and story focused channels do comment on it, so Hello Future Me often refers to it in his videos, so does lessons from the screenplay. So I already knew some of the rules, but I had never tried reading it until now. As I mentioned there is a lot in here. If you are a new writer, I would consider this to be fairly advanced. I'm also a new writer and I have no idea how I'm going to go applying this to three different ideas. So if you're looking for like a basic plotting method to get you started, I highly recommend Save the Cat. That was a really fast read, everything is very straightforward, and it provides you a solid starting point for writing a book. I think the Anatomy of Story is really good for foundations, so a lot of the different outlining methods I've looked at get very focused on plot. So they talk about character, they talk about theme, but then you get into the structure of the story, and the structure is very event focused. So this happens, then this happens, then this happens, and they don't really connect the character work to it, and the understanding I always had was that, well, if I do all of the character work and the theme work up front, then that will naturally work its way into the sequence of events as I start mapping them out. And that might be the case to a certain extent, but I didn't feel like it was a foolproof method. In the Anatomy of Story, my understanding from what I've read so far is that the structure we're working with is actually based on the protagonist's moral dilemma and how the antagonist exacerbates that, I guess, triggers that. So I almost feel like if you follow this method and do it right, it will be impossible not to incorporate all of that character work and all of that antagonist, protagonist work, all of the themes, all of the moral issues you want to discuss, and so on. But again, there is a lot here, so I do have a feeling this will end up being a multi-video series, especially since the plan is to try applying all of the steps in this framework to three different ideas. So the overall process I'm following is three ideas, three different plotting methods. For each idea, I'll try mapping it out with each of the plotting methods, and by the time November comes around, I will be working on whichever idea has the most substance at that stage. So what are the ideas? Well, this year I'm doing it a little bit differently, so the last couple of times I've done this, I've picked brand new ideas. So things where often I didn't have more than a sentence or a paragraph about the world or what the story was going to be about. This time I thought it might be fun to try going through this experiment with ideas that are at different stages. So I'm going to do one brand new idea that has no substance, no plot, it's just like a premise I'd like to explore. The second one is I'm actually going to pick up one of the ideas I mapped out for NaNoWriMo last year, but not the one I ended up writing. So that's one where there's an idea, I have some story beats, so there's a bit more thought that's gone into it. Having said that, I won't be picking up all of my notes from last year and expanding on them, I will be treating it like it's a new idea. However, because I've already done that work, there is more in my head. The third idea is actually a book that I've already drafted, but I'm 90% sure it needs to be completely rewritten. So again, this is one where I will be following these exercises as if I have nothing, I'll be starting them from scratch, but I obviously have a lot more of this world, a lot more of these characters, a lot more of the key events I want to have happen in my head. So it's going to be interesting to see how the different methods I'm going to try will work for ideas at each of those stages and whether there are methods that are better for an idea where there's absolutely nothing and you need help fleshing it out versus methods that are good when you have an entire world built and you just need help organizing it. So the ideas are the one that's a pure idea is I thought it would be fun to do a mystery, maybe a murder mystery from the point of view of a character with dissociative identity syndrome or more commonly known as multiple personality disorder. And the reason I thought that would be interesting is that each chapter could be from the point of view of a different altar, so each of them are getting different clues but because the different altars aren't communicating with each other there's no one who can put all of it together. And I thought it would be fun to reveal like halfway through the book that I can't say they're all the same person because they're not each altar is a distinct person but they're all in the same body so I thought that could be a fun reveal. That's all I've got for it, I don't actually know what the crime is or anything else, I just like the idea of that premise, I think that could be fun to work with. Idea number two is one that I tried mapping out for Nana Raimo last year and it's about a storybook villain who is dead and in hell and wants to take over heaven. Idea number three is my fantasy hot mess, so this is a book I originally drafted when I was at university, I think I was 19-20 and I did it over one summer and I loved it. It's a story that has lived in my head for over a decade now and a couple of years ago I decided I wanted to try looking at it again so I think it was 2017 and I basically started writing it again from scratch, I think I got maybe 30,000 words and then life happened and put it aside until mid-last year when I decided okay now I'm going to really commit to becoming a writer, learning my craft and I picked that up for Last Cat Nana Raimo. So that's a 111,000 word draft I believe that is a mess, like I can't even describe the plot in one sentence, basically there's a macguffin that goes missing that sort of sets everything in motion but that's not actually what it's about, like on one hand you've got this mage who wants to get all of the magic students and create a revolution and on the other hand you've got the third son of the king who's gone to this university undercover and he's trying to investigate, I don't even know what he's trying to investigate to be completely honest and then there's another point of view character who she is like naturally skilled and magic but she really wants to be an engineer and so sort of get to bring in some steampunk elements because it's turn of the, not turn of the current century, turn of the last century and the problem is that these characters don't really have any reason to be hanging out with each other and I worked quite hard last year to sort of create these plots that work together but they don't really work together like it's sort of just these people happen to be in the same place at the same time and they end up in a dungeon together for the epic final battle scene so this needs to be rewritten from scratch and I'm hoping that the anatomy of story can help. It has been a couple of days since I filmed the intro to this video and I've decided it is time to get started on the premise for the anatomy of story otherwise I never will or otherwise I will but I won't get everything done in time for NaNoWriMo. So what is a premise? The way it's tackled in the anatomy of story is basically that it's a one sentence summary of what your book's about. So some examples of this are the godfather, the youngest son of a mafia family, takes revenge on the man who shot his father and becomes the new godfather. Casablanca, a tough american expatriate, rediscovers an old flame only to give her up so that he can fight the Nazis. Star Wars, when a princess falls into mortal danger a young man uses his skills as a fighter to save her and defeat the evil forces of the Galactic Empire. Now most craft books take the approach of here are a bunch of examples now come up with yours and some of them might have like one or two things that your premise needs to do. The anatomy of story is a little bit more complex than that. Here's what I need to do to create my premise. One, write down your premise in one sentence. Ask yourself if this premise line has the makings of a story that could change your life. Two, wishlist and premise list. Write down your wishlist and your premise list. So from memory I believe the wish list is everything you would love to include in your book and the premise list is everything that directly relates to the premise. Possibilities, look for what is possible in the premise. Story challenges and problems. What are the challenges and problems that might come up when writing this story? Now this isn't something that will be in your premise but this is something to think about now so you know how to tackle it in the writing process and it may also change your premise once you've realized what some of the challenges are. Designing principle. Come on with the designing principle of your story idea. Remember that this principle describes some unique process or form in which the story will play out. Best character. Determine the best character in the idea so this becomes your protagonist. Conflict. Ask yourself who is my hero fighting and what is he fighting about. Basic action. Find the single cause and effect pathway by identifying a basic action that your hero will take in the story. Character change. Figure out the possible character change for your hero starting with the basic action then going to the opposites of the basic action to determine his weaknesses at the beginning and his change at the end. Moral choice. List a moral choice your hero may make near the end of the story. Make sure it's a difficult but plausible choice and then audience appeal. Ask yourself if your premise is likely to appeal to a wider audience. If not go back to the drawing board after doing all of that work. So to come up with a good premise I actually need to go through 11 steps. This might take a while. So this is why I'm glad I decided to reread the chapter as I went because the first step in the exercise at the end of the chapter said to write your premise I believe whereas in the chapter the first step is to write something that will change your life and I originally thought it was like general brainstorming about right around why it would change your life and when I read this it actually said first you need to write down anything that you would love to write so anything you've wanted to see on a screen and a book and so on then you need to write a list of premises or premises so all of your book ideas and then you need to see what are the common threads in the things that will change your life and which ones apply to the premises to like narrow down the list now I don't know how relevant this is to me because I already have a short list of three ideas that I want to work on and when I try to think about like how it will change my life I don't know I have very realistic expectations for if something's really going to change my life because I've been to a lot of like life changing events or done life changing courses or read life changing books and most of the time my life's pretty similar after them so I yeah like I can think of why I want to write an idea but life changing is terminology I struggle with and it's probably not going to change my life unless it becomes like a best selling book which isn't just down to the idea so that's something if we put that to the side though one of the things I've been struggling with is that I can think of reasons why I want to write each of these stories but I'm struggling to think of things I want to write about in general and I don't know if that's a problem so I'm going to continue brainstorming and maybe I will just focus on the reasons why I want to write these particular stories but it's an interesting conundrum and I'd be interested to hear like I'd be interested to hear how you would approach this or how you do approach this when you're exploring a new book idea do you start with everything you would love to write about and then narrow down from there or do you have a couple of ideas and then flesh those out with why you would love to write that idea so let me know in the comments I've now attempted the first three steps I won't say finish because I do think I need to continue thinking about them over the next couple of days but I've started them so what's interesting is that this doesn't really feel like it's going towards me writing a premise as in the one sentence summary it's more like it's about developing the idea so I'm going to hold off on sharing my premises until I have been through all of the steps but at the moment it does feel more like fleshing out the idea rather than trying to nail that sentence so the first thing is the wish list now the wish list I already mentioned earlier I felt it's a bit difficult because I'm already thinking about these three ideas rather than thinking about what I want to write about in general I'm not trying to generate an idea I'm trying to solidify the ideas I already have so for each of them I just wrote why do I want to write that book and what excites me about that book and unsurprisingly the one that I've already drafted has much more because it has much more like there's a full draft there so I can think about all of the things I like about that draft whereas for the other ones like one two three four five so I've got five bullet points for the villain in heaven slash hell one and yeah the same for the DID murder mystery so I'm curious to see how that expands but given that I'm not too worried about changing my life I don't expect these books to change my life and I'm already interested in the ideas I'm not sure how essential it is to get that step but I am going to continue to let it marinate over the next couple of days and maybe I'll think of more the second step was thinking about possibilities so that's what could happen and what might be interesting what would I like to explore beyond the initial idea this one I really struggled with for the book that I already have just because there's so much there so I'm like everything I'm doing everything I say what if about is already in that book or already in the world so it's not really an exploratory question for that book for the other two it was a bit more interesting especially for the DID mystery one because that's brand new so I haven't done this before and that's been helpful for exploring more possibilities as you'd expect so some of the possibilities so what if not all of the altars are good so for example there could be a persecutor archetype what if the crime witness is reminiscent of the main character's trauma what if the book is a larger discussion on trauma and abuse what if the victim is the protagonist like what if the victim of the crime in the book is the protagonist's abuser or what if one of the altars killed him so I think this is a good exercise at this stage in the process when there something is brand new and you're looking to flesh it out I don't know how much value it has for something that we've already done this work basically but again going to continue playing with over and over the next couple of days the next exercise so number three was problems and challenges with the idea and for the book I've already written this was quite easy because I know all of the problems that are in the existing draft so things like multiple viewpoints and how to combine these in a larger story there's a lot to cover how do I maintain momentum while building the world while introducing the magic system while exploring character dynamics while giving backstory and I don't know if I've mentioned this before in other videos but I think one of the things I did wrong with this book is I thought about it for too long because I mentioned that I did it over 10 years ago when I was at university and really seriously picked it up again last year and the thing is even though I wasn't working on it during that period I was thinking about it and occasionally I was looking at craft books and character sheets and seeing all of this advice around how you really need to have a strong world and you really need to have strong characters and all of this stuff so I've built a world and there's historical events that directly impact the current story from 30 years ago and there's relationships between different characters and everyone's backstory and I feel like there's so much that trying to put it into a cohesive story is really a problem now and it would almost be better if I had have just focused on the story and then fleshed it out from there but who knows maybe after I go through all of this it'll be a bit easier if I end up rewriting this book for nanorimo though I think it would be interesting to compare the experience of writing this book so fantasy hot mess with my experience writing powerless because powerless was very much like I had a skeleton when I started whereas this has all of the flesh and muscle and organs but the skeleton's a little chaotic and what happened with powerless even in revisions is that the overall layout and plot remained the same and I was more trying to build on it and add more depth which when I think about how I approach nonfiction I feel like that's a lot easier if you've got the foundations right it's easier to build on them whereas if your foundations are rubbish it's really hard to fix it which is why I'm looking at starting this other one again so it'll be interesting to see how I go with rewriting this given that I have all of this information in my head and I'm not sure how it combines into a single cohesive storyline it's been a few days and I'm now continuing with the premise exercises in the anatomy of story now I can't remember if I listed the steps I'd done last time so I'll do it now just in case so the first one was to write something that would change your life the second one is to explore what's possible and the third step was to identify problems and challenges with your idea now step four is to create a designing principle and this is something that conceptually I find a bit of a struggle I think I already have it for two of my ideas though but that's because it was part of the initial idea not because I had an idea and then constructed this around it so what John Truby says is the designing principle is the seed of the story and it's the single most important factor in making your story original and effective sometimes this principle is a symbol or a metaphor known as the central symbol the grand metaphor or the root metaphor but it's often larger than that the designing principle tracks the fundamental process that will unfold over the course of the story does that mean anything to you because it's not very specific it does get a little bit easier when he gives examples though so the first one is the godfather so let's say you're a writer who wants to show the intimate workings of the mafia in America as literally hundreds of screenwriters and novelists have done if you were good you might come up with this designing principle use the classic fairy tale strategy for showing how the youngest of three sons becomes the new king so when I saw that and a couple of the other examples I'm like okay so the designing principle is not the story I'm telling but the way I'm telling the story so if the idea is I want to tell a story about the mafia the way I'm going to tell it is by structuring it as a fairy tale now not all the examples he gives are this clear so for example Moses in the book of Exodus premise when an Egyptian prince discovers he is a Hebrew he leads his people out of slavery designing principle a man who does not know who he is struggles to lead his people to freedom and receives the new moral laws that will define him and his people now for me I feel like either of those could have been the premise it's like two different ways of describing what happens so I don't feel like that was the best example however Ulysses premise track a day in the life of a common man in Dublin designing principle in a modern odyssey through the city over the course of a single day one man finds a father father and the other man finds a son or four weddings in a funeral a man falls in love with a woman but first one and then the other is engaged to someone else designing principle a group of friends experiences four weddings and a funeral as they look for their right partner in marriage so that you can see it's the structure through which the story is told so for my own mental processing I'm trying to focus on those ones where there's a clear distinction in what the premise is and the way it's told versus something like Star Wars or Harry Potter or Exodus where it's it's not as clear to me so with that in mind the two of my ideas I feel like I already have a designing principle so one of them is about a fictional villain going to hell and trying to take over heaven and I thought the designing principle could be using fictional heroes and villains to explore social inequality I think I need to work on my premise so there isn't as much overlap but that's the idea similarly the third idea was the mystery being solved by someone with dissociative identity disorder the framing device is someone with multiple personalities is trying to solve a crime so I don't know if that makes sense if someone is more familiar with the anatomy of story please tell me if I'm doing this wrong but I feel like the pure premise of the DID one is it's a woman needs to solve a murder like very very simple and then the designing principle is that woman happens to have DID and we solve the murder through the eyes of each of her altars now given that in both of those examples I had that information in the original premise I'm not sure how necessary it is to have the designing principle as a separate thing unless I'm missing something so again if you're better at this than me please let me know the idea I'm struggling with is my fantasy hot mess because that's just a fantasy story that's triggered by a maduffin going missing like I don't know how to add a designing principle to that and other than saying come up with a designing principle the book doesn't actually provide much guidance it's just this is what the designing principle is here are some examples of them come up with yours and I'm not sure how unless you immediately have some inspiration for it hmm maybe I'll just try some brainstorming and see what comes out of it step five is then who is the best character for this story and for the one I've written I sort of know the world and who the characters are and I love them all so that's the question of who is the best is a little bit difficult but because it's a multi-point of view book I don't think there's a problem because all of them can be featured in the story with the other two it's a little bit difficult though because I don't know who the characters are yet like these are just ideas so with the idea of a storybook villain wanting to take over heaven well clearly the storybook villain is the most interesting character because that's the only character I have to find similarly if the story is about a girl with DID trying to solve a murder she's the only character mentioned in the premise so she's automatically the best character so I'm not actually sure how to go about this exercise because the questions are who do I love do I want to see him act do I love the way he thinks do I care about the challenges he has to overcome like none of that exists yet so I don't know how it's possible to do it at this stage in the process unless I go into like unless I start developing a bunch of characters now but character actually happens later in the process so it's a little bit difficult one hour later of the 10 steps there are for premise I've been through the first eight to the rest of my ability I'm not going to worry about 10 because that's gauging audience appeal and honestly at this stage in my writing career I really just want to build up the habit of writing and the ability to write and I know that what I write now may not be publishable so I'd rather just focus on writing what I want to write rather than trying to think about what will have audience appeal when probably not going to get published anyway so all in all this was an interesting exercise I feel like I basically got the premise he's right at the beginning or at least I managed to do a one sentence summary that fairly accurately describes the book the last couple of exercises were definitely the hardest they related to character change and the moral choice the character needs to make and it is a little hard to think of those off the top of your head so I think I'm going to continue going however for now I thought I'd go through what I had starting with the idea where I had nothing and then working backwards to the one where I already have a book so the first one codename DID mystery premise when a girl with DID stumbles upon a dead body her alters must work together to find the killer the first three steps are all of the exploratory brainstorming ones so rather than going through everything I wrote I'm just going to give you a couple of points because if I do everything I wrote for all three ideas this is going to be a very long video so step one was write something that will change your life where the exercise was basically be really clear on why you want to write this book so for me what gets me excited is the idea of having these mind-bending reveals like I really want to be Blake Crouch I also like the idea of the reader having more information than the character does so as the reader you're putting together all of these pieces the character only has what they can see from their perspective so there's a sense of tension where you're like the clue is just there figure it out step three is explore the possibilities so what else can I explore beyond the original idea and I thought maybe this could be a wider exploration of trauma and abuse since the idea is generally caused by trauma that happens in young children the designing principle as I mentioned earlier it's inherent in the premise a woman with multiple personalities solves a murder mystery from the different perspectives of her alters step five was determining the best character I only have one character at the moment so I've skipped that for now I might come back to it once we've done the character work later in the book step six get a sense of the central conflict so the conflict is the girl wants to solve the crime the killer doesn't want to get caught I'm not really sure what to do beyond that at this stage in the process but that's what I've got step seven was to get a sense of a single cause and effect pathway so I think this is most useful when you've got a complex story in mind and you're trying to cover a lot of different things and you don't know how to put it together so this helps you put it all into one sentence so an example John Truby gives is a man falls in love and fights his brother for control of a winery so you can see that that sort of has two stories one the man falls in love two he fights his brother for the winery and the point of this exercise is to put it all together so there's a clear storyline the way he's done it is through the love of a good woman a man defeats his brother for control of the winery so still got all the same elements but it all comes together in a single story for me because there's not that much to this idea yet I didn't feel like there was anything else I could do here like it's already woman needs to solve a murder mystery with her altars like there's not I don't know if I'm making sense but I don't feel like that's too complex I feel like that's already very straightforward so this exercise wasn't necessary step eight is to determine the hero's possible character change now this is where things started getting really difficult because it is early stages I haven't put that much thought into characters but I thought the weakness could be she doesn't know herself or she refuses to accept herself generally people with DID don't know they have the disorder because there is this like amnesia wall that goes up between personalities so when you know one person's inhabiting the body none of the others are aware of it obviously when you become aware and you can start to communicate with your altars things change so I thought it could start with this woman who's in this early stage and she isn't aware that she has this disorder she isn't aware that she has altars the action is working with the altars to find a killer and the change is learning about and accepting this part of herself and then step nine was think about the character's possible moral choice I'm not sure what to do for this one I think it could be something like she discovers who the killer is and maybe doesn't want to turn them in because she is connected to them somehow but I haven't developed that part of the book yet so I'm just going to keep that in the back of my mind but no response for this just yet now the next one codename happily ever after is the one where I did outlining last year but haven't done any more so premise when a storybook villain gets sentenced to hell he decides to team with his fellow captors to take over heaven wish list why do I want to write this I think one it would be cool to incorporate well-known fairy tale and fictional characters into this new story so something like shrek and two I think discussions on good and evil and redemption arcs and when forgiveness is and isn't possible I think that would be interesting to explore possibilities I think it would be interesting to use this to explore the idea of like broken social systems or broken social structures and the idea that people aren't evil or good in a vacuum people aren't successful or unsuccessful in a vacuum often those who are successful have a much stronger starting point they're born into families that are already successful they have access to education and resources and connections and so on so the idea that it's not a level playing field even for these fictional characters and maybe no bad hell good heaven isn't the solution maybe there should be another way the next one is problems with this story and the biggest one I could think of is what makes this unique this could easily be a bunch of cliches designing principle the systemic nature of social inequality is explored by famous fictional heroes and villains in the afterlife best character like the last one there's only one character mentioned in the premise that's my best character conflict the villain wants to conquer heaven heroes don't want him to probably powers that be you don't want him to again with the single cause and effect pathway I didn't think that was necessary for this one because it is just a straightforward idea at the moment I don't need to bring there isn't anything to bring together into a single pathway and then character change I thought weakness the villain could be like said in his ways has no expectations of himself to be any different and that's reinforced by everyone around him underestimating him and making assumptions about him being a certain way the action is obviously planning to take over heaven the change I think that's discovering that he has the ability to change maybe discovering that there are better ways to go about doing things like most of the time the end doesn't justify the means so I need to do a bit of work on condensing this one but there are basically two changes one is being sort of really fixed and rigid and moving towards the understanding that he can change and the other one is sort of being morally bankrupt to learning how to be good learning how to be better and moral choice again no idea at this moment like stop being that maybe I have no idea now my last one is my fantasy hot mess and I think the latest steps in this process were really helpful for not making me realize that this story is flawed because I already knew that but further highlighting how this story is flawed but anyway premise when a magical tool goes missing a student the son of the king and a master mage battle to be the one to find and control it now because I've written this book I know that that premise isn't that accurate but it was the easiest way to put everything into one sentence basically there's a macguffin that sets the plot in motion it isn't actually that bigger thing later in the plot but it is the one thing that unites all these characters so it's going to be interesting if I decide to rewrite this figuring out it just how to make it work wish list so this one had a very long wish list because obviously I'm familiar with this story I'm familiar with these characters I'm familiar with the world and I love them even though it's mess so the big wish list thing here is that I have this world and these characters that I love and I would just love to find a way to bring them to life in a way that's engaging and entertaining and enjoyable that people want to read that people learn things from you know I just it's my baby I want it's my baby I want it to grow up and be big and strong and healthy my battery ran out but I'm back so the next one was what's possible and one of the things I always liked about this world and universe was the idea of magic being a learnt skill like any other and yes there might be some people who have innate talent but in most cases if you put in the work then you'll be able to master it there's also the idea of exploring the aftermath of a genocide which is more part of the world building than this book and I am not a good enough writer to pull that off yet problems first one multiple viewpoints and how do I combine them in a longer story there's so much to cover so how do I maintain the momentum and build the world and introduce the magic system and show character dynamics as well as sharing back story while keeping the plot moving forward and the other thing are all these characters apart the same story I think I mentioned these problems earlier but this book has a lot in there and I spent so long thinking about it before I went back to it that I feel like when I wrote it again I had too much and I just didn't know how to put it together designing principle so I'm really not sure but this one still so I've got exploring friend and family dynamics when multiple people cover the same object but it needs work I yeah I really need to think about what ties this together clearly because that's where all of my problems are best character now this is different to the other ones in that I have a whole cast of characters and I think they're all interesting so there are there were originally four point of view characters when I did the first draft I'm fairly comfortable taking that down to three because one of them didn't have that much to bring to the table when I revisited the book last year the other three I still feel like they're good point of view characters but it might be interesting to diminish one's presence a little bit because he is the antagonist and it could also be interesting to step into the mind of some other characters like just for a chapter or two conflict so for this it all boils down to who is going to control this city or if we take a quote from Batman in the fight for the soul of Gotham or in this case the fight for the soul of Daruman basically this city it's supposed to be like that idea that whoever rules London rules the world except in this world it's this city the antagonist wants control again he actually wants to restore the world to the way it was 30 years ago before this genocide the other characters don't want him to more because it's the whole ends justifying the means type of thing like even though his goal may be noble how many people is he going to hurt on his way there so they're more about stopping him rather than also wanting to control this city then single cause and effect pathway I have no idea I don't know I don't know how to bring it all together and I don't know if I need to bring it all together for the entire book or if I just need a single cause and effect pathway for each of the point of view characters so again if you know this process better than me let me know in the comments character change this was one of the bits where I went okay I can see what's wrong with this book or one of the things that's wrong with this book because originally I just did sort of state beginning state to end state so Perry blind faith to questioning Aubrey suspicious to trusting Jioden ambitious to hopelessness reign all powerful to threatened Medara hungry for autonomy and to being destroyed by her power so I had these spectrums and then I tried to do it the way John Truby does in the book so he basically restructures the premise starting with the character's weakness the action they take and the change they experience so an uptight hen pecked man becomes involved with a gang of outlaws and gets a divorce weakness uptight hen pecked man action becomes involved with a gang of outlaws change gets a divorce I don't know how to do this for the premise when we've got more than one character that I'm doing it for so I just looked at weakness action change for each of the main characters so Perry weakness she's naive action learns more about the history of Dariman change is questioning Aubrey suspicious and untrusting action works with Perry to achieve his goal change learns certain people can be trusted Jioden ambitious at all costs action steals the McGuffin to take over the city change fails and loses all hope so in isolation none of those are bad the thing is they're not the same story like and how do I put them together into the same story so I don't know I need to think about that more I honestly I don't know if I should just give up on this idea but yet the moment they're all different stories I feel like even if the weakness and the change is different for each character maybe the action should be the same but again not sure how this works for books with multiple points of view and then the moral choice I need to figure out what the change is before I do that I know for Jioden it's going to be like sacrificing the students to achieve his goals so he makes the wrong moral choice Perry and Aubrey I'm not sure so I guess I've made progress at this stage I don't know how much I've got to show for the work I've done and I think the value in a lot of these exercises is even if you don't find an answer it's encouraging you to think about your idea in different ways and the more you think about it the closer you will get to an answer. It's editing Jackie here and this video is getting very long I originally thought I could squeeze premise and structure into a single video but I don't think anyone wants that after what 40 minutes or so so thank you for watching if you made it this far again if you know the anatomy of story process better than I do please give your thoughts down below because I'm really curious to learn more and see how other writers use this process and other than that I will see you next time bye