 Hello and welcome back to my channel. If you're new here my name is Jackie and I'm an aspiring writer and at the moment I am attempting to plot out two different book ideas using the Anatomy of Story by John Truby. If you are not new here you'll know that this is taking far longer than any of my other plotting and outlining experiments. Generally I get through a craft book in one to two videos and this is now episode four of this series where we are looking at chapter four which is the book's moral argument. So the moral argument of your book is the lesson that you want people to take away after reading it. It can come through through theme, symbolism, maybe dialogue but that's a very heavy-handed way of doing it and in this chapter Truby starts with figuring out one what your moral argument is so the argument you want to make in the book and then two structuring your plot to convey that argument which I think is a really fascinating way of doing it. The problem is I don't tend to write things with moral arguments, I tend to write things that are fun because I want to escape from the world so I'm not sure how I'm going to go with this. When it comes to the ideas I'm working on the first one is what I'm calling my fantasy hot mess because I still can't figure out a name. It is a book I wrote when I was 19 and I picked it up again last year when I decided to get back into writing so I have a 111,000 word draft that needs to be thrown out and rewritten because it is a hot mess of everything that I loved at the time of writing that doesn't really form a cohesive story so that's one thing. The other one is a brand new idea which is codenamed DID mystery and it's murder mystery from the point of view of someone with dissociative identity disorder and she needs to work with her altars to solve the mystery as different altars are getting different clues. So the reason I chose these two books is because one of them obviously has a lot to work with and one of them doesn't so it's interesting to see how the different exercises in the anatomy of story can help a project that's in both of those stages. When it comes to the moral argument I'm a bit worried because the fantasy hot mess does have a moral argument which is around the idea of progress at all costs and when it comes to the values of all of the characters they tend to sit on a continuum ranging from those who want to uphold like the past tradition magic in this world and those who are happy to kill everything from the old world to bring in new technology and the industrial revolution and so on. So that one I'm fairly comfortable I have the moral argument so it's going to be interesting to see how I go with the exercises in this chapter. My DID mystery book does not have a moral argument I think I actually mentioned this in the last video which was on character where there is a journey the main character goes through but it's not really moral issue so I have no idea I'm going to approach these exercises with that in mind. The good news though is that this is a much shorter chapter than the one on character so if it takes a long time that's because of me not because of the book. So what do we need to do? Well as I mentioned it starts with figuring out the moral argument and then organizing that into a plot so the exercises at the end of the chapter are one create a theme line based on your book's designing principle two write down the key choice the hero must make at the end of the story so this is moral choice three the moral problem your hero will have to confront throughout the story four positioning each of the characters as a variation on that theme and then putting the characters values in conflict so those last two are actually doubling up on some of the work from last chapter so hopefully that won't take too long and then finally we have the big moral argument exercise which is going through the plot so we have the beliefs and values the hero starts with their moral weakness their moral need and then we get into the actions which revolve around the hero taking a moral actions and not being able to make progress towards their goal until like the moral piece clicks into place so I'm really excited to tackle plot from this perspective because I never have before I am a bit worried about one of my books not having a moral argument though so this is going to be interesting so exercise one is figuring out the theme line of your book which is another way of saying like the moral of the story and I don't have any issues with like finding that I don't really like the way Truby recommends going about it which he says go back to the designing principle you created back when you were doing the story's premise and try to figure out a theme line based on that now my understanding of the designing principle is that your premise is what the story is about and the designing principle is how you're going to tell it so for the id mystery if the story is about the murder mystery the designing principle is that it's going to be told through the eyes of someone with dissociative identity disorder and the different alters needing to work together to solve the murder as opposed to any other murder mystery that might be told in a more traditional way so there are two problems here one is that my fantasy hot mess doesn't have a designing principle and it didn't then it doesn't now I don't know what the designing principle would be and two is that it's sometimes a bit difficult to see the relationship between the designing principle and the theme line or the moral so I'll give you some of the examples that Truby shares in this chapter for Ulysses the designing principle is in a modern odyssey through the city over the course of a single day one man finds a father and the other man finds a son theme line the true hero is the man who endures the slings and arrows of everyday life and shows compassion to another person in need my question here is how did you get the theme line from the designing principle like I'd prefer to work with the premise in general similarly Harry Potter the designing principle is a magician prince learns to be a man and a king by attending a boarding school for sorcerers over the course of seven school years the theme line when you are blessed with great talent and power you must become a leader and sacrifice for the good of others again these are both from the same story but I don't see how you get one based on the designing principle so for me it was easier to just go straight to the theme line and not worry about the designing principle at all so what I have for my fantasy hot mess is sometimes there is too great a cost to progress which now that I say it I don't know if that's the theme to this particular book because this is a very big world in my head which happens when something has been living in your head for over 10 years and that more relates to like the prequel trilogy if there's ever a prequel trilogy which is from 30 to 20 years ago when there was a war and a genocide and they tried to wipe out magic in order to make room for science and technology so that's a clear theme line from the earlier books and in this one the antagonist is like trying to restore the old ways I don't know I do think like that is the lesson that the protagonist learns though it still feels right to me so I don't know I mean again if you've been watching these videos you'll know that basically every time I try to like do one of the exercises for this book I have no idea what I'm doing and I think we're just going to have go through the anatomy of story and then I'll have to try writing this book and we'll see if it works. For DID history the hero's character arc and the hero is the host of her system so the one who generally fronts in the body her whole arc is that she's aware she has DID that she doesn't want it she wants to ignore it she wants to be in control of the body as much as possible she is fighting the altars and not making any room for communication or collaboration with them so the lesson is around learning to accept these parts of herself and work with them in order to solve the crime because like one of the other altars is actually the one that witnessed the crime so she doesn't have all of the information on her own so for that theme line I thought something along the lines of only when we know ourselves can we unlock our true potential because it's only by like knowing and accepting all the various facets of herself that she can solve the crime in the book the next step is the hero's moral choice and I'm going to need to take a few minutes to go and work on this because off the top of my head I'm not sure what it is for either of them so I've been looking at the moral choices for both of my books and I was struggling with both of them because as I mentioned earlier there are themes there are character journeys but I wouldn't call them like really moral things especially not with DID mystery so I started thinking and I thought I could create a choice where the person the character needs to choose between getting everything they've wanted and doing the right thing because that seems to be fairly common in the examples John Truby gives so if I read a couple of them Casablanca when Rick's ex-love Ilsa returns to him he can use two exit visas to escape with her to America Rick chooses fighting the Nazis over his love for Ilsa so there we have a choice between what he wants which is Ilsa and doing the right thing which is fighting the Nazis similarly the Maltese Falcon detective Sam Spade discovers that Brigid O'Shaughness lovely Irish names murdered his partner when the police show up Spade chooses justice over the woman who loves so again what he wants is the woman who loves but he does the right thing so in my case fur fantasy hot mess perry our hero really wants to be an engineer she wants to give up magic she's sort of just doing it to the chore she's very talented ambitious engineer um and at the beginning of the book she has an exhibit at the world's fair which is hoping will be her ticket out of Daramon the second hero or ally i'm not entirely sure what his role is yet because this is a hot mess he is the third son of the king that has been locked in a tower for almost a decade and escaped which is how he ended up here and what he really wants is recognition and an official place by his father's side so what I thought was maybe we could have a situation at the end of the book where rain who's I need to come up with a better title for him but at the moment he's the headmaster of the university where they are also rules the city state that they live in and I thought he could basically come up with a deal for them he could offer them everything they wanted in exchange for hush hushing everything that happened in the book which was they stamped out an uprising of majors and I thought that would work because it is a moral decision and they could respond with hell no and that would be nice for setting the stage for the next book which is trying to create a more balanced world that doesn't just completely throw out everything for the past for the sake of progress the problem is that if that doesn't happen until the very end of the book it doesn't affect the story in the current book it just sets it up for the sequel so I was thinking about how I could work it in and then I thought maybe before the final battle scene because there is an epic final battle in an underground dungeon which is on fire and in the original one I wrote when I was 19 I can't quite remember in fact I don't think there was any reason why they were there it was just a cool setting and I really liked the battle on the settings I wanted to keep it but I remember last year when I was trying to rewrite this I was really struggling to figure out okay how do we get everyone into this place in a way that makes sense and so I thought that maybe like the majors could have been funneled into there somehow it could be a trap and they're getting locked down there to basically die which is horrible but it works given the mindset of and the values of the world and maybe Perry and Aubrey could find out as it's happening and they want to go and Rain's like no just all you need to do is wait there's nothing for you to do just wait half an hour and it's all over and if you wait and keep quiet I will orchestrate all of this for you so they have the choice between everything they've ever wanted and doing the right thing even though the right thing would involve saving the opponent or giving the opponent an opportunity to be saved so I thought that could work better that does then raise problems with the battle scene in that why would it be a battle rather than everyone just escaping but that is a problem for future Jackie so I think that would work for DID mystery I feel like it's still not a moral choice but it's the stuff I was talking about back in the character video which is she wants control she wants to hold back the altar she just she wants to be in control of her life but in order to solve the murder she needs to like let the altars out yeah so it's a difficult decision because it feels like you know it's doing the right thing so find the killer find the evidence that he's guilty versus self-preservation it's not really a moral choice though which is annoying because until I just talked through it I thought I had it and clearly I don't so I'll need to think about that some more then when it comes to the characters as variations on the theme for fantasy hot mess that is the continuum of history past magic over here versus science technology progress the future over here and this at all costs and everyone's on that continuum so I feel like that still works does the moral choice have anything to do with the theme though this is a mess why why isn't a mess why can't I figure it out so we've got a moral choice but the moral choice isn't clearly connected to the theme does it have to be actually and this is something that's a little bit challenging about the book in that we have the theme line exercise that I went through earlier and some of the examples and then we have this moral decision the problem is all of the examples of moral decisions Truby gives they're not from the same movies as the examples he gives for the theme line so it actually makes it impossible to see how one relates to the other which means I don't know if what I'm doing is acceptable or not so in the comments as per usual if you know the anatomy of story well tell me if I'm doing it wrong so if we go back to characters as variations on a theme though in fantasy hot mess it is that continuum of history magic versus science future in d.i.d mystery there are sort of two like opposing values one is control versus freedom and the other ones order versus chaos so I think the work I did in the character chapter still holds up for this so I'm going to skip that for now the next thing we get to is constructing the moral argument through the structure of your story and this I was really struggling with because we have a list of things that you need to cover so we have values moral weakness moral need first a moral action desire drive more moral actions and so on and what I got stuck with when I started with fantasy hot mess was that I wasn't sure what sequence everything should happen in so when the desire takes place is that like just an initial desire the hero has or is that the thing that sets the plot in motion um are you only allowed to have one a moral action before that desire kicks in so one of the things that's a little bit of a struggle about this is that it's not clear when everything happens and that's where I think methods like save the cat and story engineering are a little bit easier to work with because save the cat it splits the story into three acts and you also have this storyboard exercise where you basically got it in four rows and you move post-it notes or cards around so you can see where everything's meant to fall and in the 15 story beats he tells you which act they're supposed to fall in so you get a sense of where they are in the story and how much should happen before or after them similarly in story engineering larry brooks breaks up story into percentages so you know when the major things are meant to happen and how much space there is between them with this this is just a list of things and I'm not sure when the middle of the story is when the inciting incident when the turning point is and so on and yeah I'm maybe this will become clearer when I get to the plot chapter at the end but at the moment I'm not sure which action should go where because I'm not sure how far through the story each of these points are so I decided rather than trying to deal with my own book I thought why not look at another story because he does have a lot of examples in here but a lot of them are I mean he has tootsie in there a lot so that's not a particularly serious film but in this chapter he has Casablanca is the one I'm most familiar with and that's a fairly like that's a fairly heavy story and I'm trying not to write fairly heavy stories so I thought let's look at the Incredibles because the Incredibles is awesome so I went through the script and here's what I got so miss the first thing is values Mr. Incredible values being a superhero above living a normal life I also put he values working alone because these are two things that come up through the story his weaknesses one is the idea of working alone so he doesn't turn to others he doesn't get their support the other one is that he keeps like lashing out or doing undercover hero work when it could risk relocating his family again and his lying about it he doesn't tell Helen his wife what he's doing his need is that he needs to be honest with his family because they are stronger together so that sort of draws in both of those weaknesses the one where he's hiding what he's doing and the other one where he feels like he works best alone so by being honest and working together they're stronger so his first tomorrow action in the story is going out with Frozone to listen to the police recorder and they catch a jewellery robbery in action his second tomorrow action is getting angry with his boss and losing his job both of these he doesn't tell Helen about she needs to find out about them independently his desire is to be a hero again and the opportunity to do this is set up by syndrome so the reason I mention that is because the desire is supposed to bring him into conflict with the opponent which this does even though he doesn't realize it yet because he doesn't meet syndrome as the opponent until later in the film drive so these are the actions he takes to achieve that desire the first one is he decides to meet mirage but before we get into the other ones he actually takes a third and moral action which is that he lies to Helen about losing his job and he says that when he's going to meet mirage it's the business conference has been sent on we go back to drive which is he defeats the omnodroid on the island he gets back in shape and he gets a new super suit then attacked by ally so Helen is the ally she discovers that he repaired his suit and she goes to see edna behind his back to find out what's going on so that's not a direct attack she doesn't attack him but she is investigating his actions so I think this counts then we get to obsessive drive so obsessive drive is the next step in this moral argument structure however this moral argument structure isn't the complete plot so there's stuff that happens before this so what I consider to be the obsessive drive here is once he realizes who syndrome is and decides he needs to stop him however there are a few things that happen between the attack of the ally and the obsessive drive in order for us to get to that point so we've got bob going back to the island um he's attacked by a new robot he discovers syndrome the opponent and that everything was a setup and he discovers all of the other supers that syndrome has killed so I think that moment when he discovers everyone that syndrome has killed that's when it moves beyond pure survival to we've got to stop this guy so that's the obsessive drive then we have all of the actions that take place in this part of the story and what's interesting is it's not just him because Helen and the kids get involved so he makes his way back into the lair searches the database for luster girl to see if um they've found her Helen flies to the island after bob the kids have stowed away they survive the missiles they make their way through the lair to find bob kids fight goons in the jungle and they escape from syndrome then we have the battle which is the next point in the moral argument so here they go back home the omnidroid has been set loose and bob realizes that they need to work together in order to defeat it he originally says i don't know if it's to Helen as well as the kids or just the kids but he wants them to run away go hide be safe and they're like no we're fighting this is a family so the final action is when they get back home and syndrome has tried to steal jack jack he throws Helen to save jack jack so i feel like that could be a couple of things one again it's not him working alone and two he could also be letting someone else have the glory he doesn't need to be the only hero so the self-revelation is that he's stronger when he doesn't work alone as opposed to his belief beforehand where he only works alone and the decision was letting the family fight with him so it was really easy to do this actually which i think shows like just what a good film the Incredibles is and how well structured it is so now that i've done this i think i'm going to sit on this overnight and just let it marinate and hopefully when i come back to this tomorrow i'll have a little bit more insight into how to create this structure for a new book as well as fix my hot mess of a fantasy story and organize it in this way so i will see you tomorrow it has been a week since i last filmed and i've been thinking about the moral argument exercises the entire time also someone outside is using a leaf blower i'm not sure if you can hear it it's very annoying but it is what it is anyway it's been a week since i filmed i've been thinking about the moral argument the entire time and i'm having a few different problems with this one is i'm not sure whether the immoral actions that take place early in the moral argument structure are supposed to be related to the overall moral argument or whether they can just be immoral in general and because i'm not familiar with all of the examples in the book i really don't have a lot of basis for comparison and i've also tried googling this and there is very little discussion on this part of the anatomy of story online so in my fantasy hot mess the moral choice that i thought could happen towards the end of the book is the choice between letting the majors burn and saving deramon which is a representation of everything that the protagonist believes so progress at all costs versus setting them free but potentially letting deramon be destroyed and also you know not getting what she wants because i thought one of the characters could sort of bribe her to let them die just leave the door locked so that works well in the world of the book i think it could be an interesting moment for the characters it works well with the theme which is uh sometimes progress comes at two greater cost however then when i went back and tried to do the structure which starts with the hero taking a moral action then finding their desire then drive them various moral actions up until we get to the final battle i first thought well maybe what she wants in the in the current version of the book what she wants at the beginning is to basically secure her future outside of university so she's presenting at the world's fair and is hoping that will lead to a job offer with a prestigious engineering firm um and in the draft i wrote she originally didn't get to present because someone changed the name to her partner's name at the last minute so she was all in a huff about that and went to complain to the headmaster slash ruler of the town slash father figure and um that led to various things that aren't going to happen anymore but now i thought potentially we could still keep that and that could lead to him giving her a test which is to learn about the macguffin in the book which is the thing that gets the plot going and i thought okay well maybe we make um getting the macguffin her desire line or at least understanding the guffin so she can get what she wants and then i thought well in a moral action so in the original version of the book it was given to her i thought maybe in this version she could steal it because that's a moral but that has nothing to do with the theme of the book or the great moral argument that the book's about so i don't know if that's an acceptable and moral action or not another challenge i'm having is that i like my characters to be good people like they're not black and white everyone's gray everyone does stupid things or selfish things or makes mistakes but i don't really have characters that are actively malicious and even like even my antagonists not so much like for the four people in the world who have read powerless at this point out of them the antagonist isn't actively malicious or evil he's more pursuing his goals at any cost and he doesn't really care if it costs his children's well-being or lives and so on similarly there's this doctor character who tortures the protagonist in that book and again he's not evil or malicious he's a scientist who's doing it to see what'll happen so my characters are a lot like that and when you put it through that lens i mean yes i suppose you can say they're doing bad things they're a moral but coming at it from the angle of what can this person do that is really bad is really difficult for me to get my head around so maybe i just need to change the wording there the other challenge i'm having is again with the wording just the idea of having a morality focus at all so because i was having so much trouble with the fantasy hot mess i decided to put that aside and went back to look at d.i.d mystery and as you know d.i.d mystery doesn't really have like a moral theme or argument it's really about knowing yourself and sort of coming into your true power once you accepting that knowledge who you are so with that in mind i was able to go through the values weakness need and then for the moral actions i thought that could relate to the investigation so first a moral action i have the character lying about where she was at the time of the murder because basically i want this book to start with her like standing over the dead body covered in blood and no idea how she got there because another altar was at the front when the murder happened so she needs to get back to her room somehow i'm thinking everyone's like in a hotel or on an island for some family event and that will create the they're all stuck in the same place until the investigation's over dynamic that you need but anyway she covered in blood sees the body like books it to get out of there and someone else where she was and she lies that could be in a moral action the desire is to find the murderer obviously drive is the things you do in order to achieve that desire so i thought she would start with basically trying to figure out what happened and where she was the previous day next to moral action i thought maybe she could hide what she's learned and what she knows from the investigators that's impeding the investigation and it's also helping the opponent because it's preventing the killer from being caught tacked by ally i thought travis who's one of the altars could take over to start putting things together and potentially yeah i haven't really thought this through but me i don't know if he'll make the situation better or worse but he's um the protector alter he is the one who's most in favor of collaboration and communication between all of them so i think he'll know more about what's happening from or what each of the different altars know than diana the main host will so yeah he could take over that could be the attack by the ally obsessive drive so i think something will happen that makes her realize who the killer is and now rather than just finding the murderer or proving her innocence she needs to find a way to incriminate him a moral action maybe planting evidence yeah and then we get to the battle which is some confrontation with the killer and so on so here again we've got a moral actions but it's not really related to the central theme which is around knowing yourself again anyone who knows the anatomy of story really well my question is do the moral actions need to be related to the main theme line or moral argument of the book or can they be any immoral actions that the hero is taking out of desperation or because um they haven't learned what they need to learn yet so please let me know so my status at the moment is fantasy hot mess is still a hot mess i'm not sure what to do with it or i want there to be hope because like i love this story and these characters in this world and there's already so much there so i would love to turn it into something coherent but i don't know if there is hope for didi mystery i feel like everything's making sense but it's not a moral tale so i don't know if it meets john truby's criteria the other thing that's a little frustrating is that even though like i'm going through the steps everything's still very vague it's like yes she lies about where she was or she plants evidence but it's what evidence does she plant and i'm not entirely sure whether i'm supposed to be figuring out all of that now or whether at this stage in the process it's okay just to have the really broad strokes and i'll continue fleshing them out in the later chapters so it's kind of interesting to see how i go my main concern at the moment is i'm going to stay stuck on this stage and i'll never get through this process and i'll never write anything new again which is not ideal since i haven't met any of my writing goals this year but yeah we'll see i'll check back in tomorrow it is the next day and i've decided that it's time for me to give up on the moral argument and there are a couple of reasons for this i mean there's one reason for this it's just i'm not getting anywhere and i'd like to move forward but i also think there's value in moving forward with the other steps in the anatomy of story and then coming back to this once i have a little bit more information particularly because one of the things john truby says in this chapter as well as the um as well as the plot chapter is that all of the points he lists aren't necessarily in order so i'm hoping at least once i have a clearer idea of the plot of each book then i'll have a better idea about the different and moral actions they can take so where am i well with the id mystery i ended up deciding just to go with what i had yesterday so if i flip forward to that page okay so we have her values of safety control predictability witnesses she's a control freak and she's afraid of her altars um her need is to acknowledge and accept that she has altars in order to heal and to recognize that they can work stronger together as a system her first immoral action is lying about her whereabouts at the time of the murder her desire is to find the murderer and her drive is tracing her steps to figure out where she was the day before when the murder happened the second immoral action is hiding her findings from the investigator on the case and even sending him on a wild boos chase to buy herself time and then attacked by an ally i think as i said yesterday that's when her altar travers comes to the front and i was thinking he could come clean to the investigator about their disorder and what's happening so that's it is in everyone's best interest because that'll help the murderer get caught but it's also like a betrayal to diana who doesn't want anyone to know then we get the obsessive drive so now she's a suspect which means she needs to clear her name i also thought what could happen here is maybe she realizes who the killer is and that creates this obsessive drive to figure out how to like get him caught even incriminate him and i'm into your minds about this because one if we find out who the killer is at this stage that then takes the mystery out of the book but that's not necessarily a problem that just means the main conflict or question isn't figuring out who the murderer is it's figuring out how to make him pay for his crimes when no one suspects him and the reason i think it might be good to have it here is because i think the immoral actions that come out of trying to like get him caught would be stronger than the immoral actions that would come out of her trying to clear her name because if she's trying to make sure he gets caught that's when we come into planting evidence so yeah the third immoral action i've got planting or destroying evidence the battle that's a final confrontation with the killer where she's able to use the knowledge gained from her alters to push him into making a confession perhaps there's also a final action against the opponent um which i'm not sure about like it could be set up so he's being recorded without knowing it or maybe um the investigators listening in so i need to think about that a bit more the moral self revelation is that she acknowledges and accepts her alters and recognizes that they're stronger when they work together her moral decision is letting go of control to work with the alters rather than trying to you know push them down and figure out everything herself and the final step is the thematic revelation so what's the thematic revelation of the book and i guess yay for teamwork but i don't really have anything so all in all i think this works quite well i feel like the immoral actions are genuinely immoral she is getting in the way of a murder investigation even if her motivations are understandable or even good but i think this works even though no i'm just going to leave it there i think this works well done jackie i deserve credit for that now then we have to look at my fantasy hot mess which is still a hot mess so as per usual the reason i'm struggling with a fantasy hot mess is because i have so much and there's a big question about how to organize it and to be honest i'm perfectly okay with cutting most of the book but there are some things i want to keep because if i don't then it's not the same story so i do want to keep like three in fact i do want to keep the entire cast of characters but there are like three main ones i really want to keep which other two allies and the opponent i want the inciting incident or turning point to be when the macguffin goes missing because that's something that all three of them are invested in and i want the final battle to be in the dungeon i also want the whole message about progress at all costs and i want the history of this world where they did try to wipe out magic in a previous war and the main characters learn about this through the book so with all of that in mind i am planning to rewrite this from scratch i'm expecting most of the scenes i have in the current version of the book will be cut there are a handful of them that i really like that i might rewrite and keep in there in some form but other than the macguffin going missing and the final battle scene basically everything else is up for grabs the challenge is that even though like that feels really open when i say it like that it's just hard to complete these exercises knowing that that's where i'm going almost i it's really hard to explain without context but what you'll see as i go through this is that there's a chunk in the middle which is empty and in fact i was having so much trouble with this that i jumped forward to the chapter on plot and attempted to do the 22 plot steps and the exact same thing happened there's a chunk in the middle where i wasn't able to fill in the exact events and like i said earlier i'm not sure if part of this is because it's not clear where in the book all of these things are happening because there are far more than 22 scenes in this book it's like um it's like the save the cat beach sheet which has 15 beats there are far more than 15 different things that happen in a screenplay or a novel but they're the most important ones and with this because i'm not starting with this so with DID mystery i'm starting with this which makes it easier to just come up with those key points and then i can add other stuff in as i need it whereas with fantasy hot mess i have all of the other stuff and it almost feels like i'm either shoehorning in the important stuff or i'm trying to figure out how to turn the stuff i already have into important stuff and i'm just um yeah i'm not quite getting there so i don't know if it's just the question my husband's asked me maybe three different times today is maybe you should just give up on this book clearly you haven't done it well if you can't make this method work which is a possibility i'm also not sure maybe it's just this method doesn't work for it and then the other thing which is a distinct possibility is that i'm just not smart enough for the anatomy of story which is okay i'm still fairly new as a writer and i do feel like this book is very advanced it's far more advanced than any of the other craft books i've looked at but it's frustrating not to be able to finish an exercise so what i have i've got the values perry believes that daramon is a technological utopia and believes in the unspoken like mantra of progress at all costs her moral weaknesses she's stubborn short-sighted and has this blind faith in daramon so she is willing to like follow that philosophy and follow what reign who's the head of the town and the institution says without questioning um so her need is to question herself and her world and to be open to new possibilities to build a brighter future now in the moral argument structure the first immoral action is supposed to happen before the desire but i can't think of anything that would happen before that so i've started with the desire and then had no moral action so her general desire is respect and recognition so she does look different to everyone else in this world and she's looked down on because of it so she really wants respect and recognition she believes she can achieve this by using the world's fair to obtain a position at a prestigious engineering company once she graduates what happens in the first part of the book is she is basically given a challenge to learn about the macguffin in the book in order to get a chance to present at the fair so the immoral action she takes is she steals the macguffin and then has it stolen from her that isn't a moral action on her part but it leads into the next bit which is the drive where she agrees to a temporary alliance with orbury who also wants the macguffin in order to find it so the actions they're taking in this drive section are looking for the thief trying to learn more about it in order to find it and so on then there are supposed to be more immoral actions which i don't know what they are and then there's supposed to be an attack by the ally which isn't really possible because the idea of the attack is that the ally is attacking the immoral actions that the protagonist is taking but if i don't know what those immoral actions are there's no reason for the attack so stuck then obsessive drive so i think at this point this is when they discover the opponent is planning an uprising with the mages um and they need to stop it i'm not sure if they know that he has the macguffin at this stage or if they find out later in fact i'm not sure in the last version of the book i know when they find out but i don't know if it's before after they find out about the uprising so i'm not sure whether i should reread it or not because at this stage i'm trying to just go with this with what's in my head and i feel like if i reread it then i'd be more tied up with what i already have than i am now which would make this more difficult which is why i haven't been reading it but yeah now i'm not sure if i should let me know if you think i should read my book in the comments anyway they discover he's planning an uprising they need to stop it not sure which immoral actions come out of here and this set of immoral actions i'm not sure about because i'm not sure at what point in the plot that obsessive drive moment happens like is that the midpoint is it later because then i need to like that uniforms how much time these immoral actions need to take so that's also blank then battle is the final epic dungeon scene battle which i love and i'm going to keep the final action against the opponent i'm not going to say because spoilers the moral self-revelation is that daromon isn't the utopia she thought it was and sometimes progress can come at two greater cost and her moral decision is freeing the mages which i mentioned earlier i'm going to put her an ovary in the position where um they basically have a choice between leaving the door to the dungeon locked so they can just burn or freeing them and the reason this is a difficult choice is because freeing them puts daromon at risk which is her home it's this utopia it's what she believes in and it's not like she's actively burning them anyway she's just not doing anything so it's free the mages do the right thing versus let them out that potentially destroy this city that she loves and believes in there's also going to be like an extra carrot for keeping them locked up which is reyn's going to organize to get them both what they want what they desires were at the beginning of the book but that's more just a extra sweetener to the deal as opposed to the true moral dilemma so those two things happen and the moral decision happens before the battle i don't know if that's okay but as i mentioned earlier if i leave it until after the battle then it doesn't really have any impact on this book so i feel like it needs to happen a little bit earlier the medic revelation you know the ends don't justify the means and that's what i have so there are gaps it's not complete but i don't feel like i'm going to get any further with this until i start doing work in later parts of the book and i feel like if i look at the later stages then i'll be able to fill in those gaps hopefully so all in all this is probably the most disappointing chapter of the anatomy of story so far and it has nothing to do with the anatomy of story it just has to do with my inability to complete it and the other thing that's a little bit disheartening is that because i hadn't read this before writing powerless it's actually making me question whether like powerless is a decent book or whether i should just throw it out and start again because like i suppose they are moral questions and in fact some of them are even saying is this like this is about the rights of the majors there's a lot stuff about rights of supers in powerless but i didn't plan it with this structure i don't feel like there is that question around immoral actions and i'm wondering if like i need to follow this in order for it to be a good book or whether it's still possible for it to be a good book even without doing this so yeah let me know what you think because i do really want to get it to the stage where it's ready for submission next year i just don't know if i can do that with minor revisions and adding in some missing scenes which is what i originally thought or whether like i need to try and pull it apart and do the same thing that i'm doing for my fantasy hot mess here so let me know what you think do you think like having this sort of moral argument communicated through the structure of your story is necessary to make it a good story so let me know in the comments other than that if you like this video please give me a big thumbs up because it helps with youtube and the algorithm and everything if you're not already subscribed please subscribe to see if i make it out of the rest of anatomy of story alive and i will see you next time bye