JOHN TRUBY’S DESIGNING PRINCIPLE

I came across a concept called the designing principle while reading John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story. It’s a concept for writers. If you’re a writer, it will help you to understand the story you’re trying to write better. Make you discern what they require to get the best (dramatic effect) out of them.

Here are a few notable things I learned from John Truby’s book.

Crafting a story is a systematic process. This means it is organized or structured. Don’t simply write by instinct; try to understand what you want to write on and how to go about it.

The designing principle is an abstract concept that you’ll have to come up with to decide how to execute your story. It is unique to your story. Your premise line and theme line, which help you understand your story, form the basis of your designing principle, which tries to spot the strengths in your story and the challenges you will have writing it.

A lot of times we write by instinct. We know what we want to write about, but because we have no designing principle, we pick the first thing that comes to us, which is usually the easiest way out. And when we do this, we end up with stories that don’t feel organic, that don’t answer the hows and whys–at least, not convincingly.

Here’s what John says,

“The problem with telling a great story is you need to show the hows and the whys of human life. This means you have to have a deep and precise understanding of the biggest, most complex subject there is. And then you have to be able to translate your understanding into a story.

1. Stories are organic. Unlike a machine, they develop like a living body.

2. Storytelling is an exacting craft with precise techniques that lead to success, regardless of the medium or genre you choose.

3. Characters and plots need to grow naturally out of the original story idea.

The main challenge facing the storyteller seems to be constructing a story from a vast array of techniques and making it feel organic. It must feel like a single thing that grows and builds to a climax. If you want to be a great storyteller, you must master this technique to a high degree that your characters seem to be acting on their own, even though you are the one making them act.

Here’s a simple definition of a story:

A speaker tells a listener what someone did to get what he wanted and why.

There are three distinct elements from the above definition.

The teller

The listener

The story

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.

Stories give audiences a form of knowledge, emotional knowledge, but in a playful, entertaining way.

As a creator of verbal games that let the audience relive a life, the storyteller is constructing a kind of puzzle about people and asking them to figure it out.

The author creates this puzzle in two major ways.

1. He tells the audience certain information about a made-up character.

2. He withholds certain information from the audience.

When the audience no longer has to figure out the story (because it all makes perfect sense), the story stops.

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

Key Point: All stories are a form of communication that expresses the dramatic code, an artistic description of how a person can grow or evolve.”

Thank you, John.

You may ask, what does he mean by ‘the dramatic code’

Here’s what John has to say about the dramatic code:

In the dramatic code, change is fuelled by desire.

Desire is what makes the world go around. It is what propels all conscious living things and gives them direction.

A story tracks what a person wants, what he’ll do to get it, and what costs he’ll have to pay along the way.

Once a character has a desire, the story ‘walks’ on two ‘legs’, the legs being acting and learning.

Anyone who goes after a desire and is impeded is forced to struggle (forced to take action and learn from his actions). And that struggle makes him change (or grow as a person).

The ultimate goal of the dramatic code, and the storyteller, is to present change in a character or to illustrate why that change did not occur.”

Here’s John again.

“Each story has its own unique set of rules or challenges. These are particular problems that are deeply embedded in the idea, and you cannot escape them. Nor do you want to.

Most writers, if they identify the problems at all, do so after they’ve written the complete story. That’s far too late.

The trick is to learn how to spot inherent problems right at the premise line.”

What is the premise line? Let’s ask John Truby:

“The premise line is your entire story condensed to a single sentence.  

The premise line will suggest the essence of the story, and we will use that to figure out how to develop it so that we get the most out of the idea.”

Let’s look at the movie Tootsie to see the difference between the premise line and the design principle.

Premise line:

When an actor can’t get work, he disguises himself as a woman and gets a role in a TV series, only to fall in love with one of the female members of the cast.

Designing Principle (concept)

To force a male chauvinist to live as a woman. 

(challenge the concept poses)

You will have to show in a structured way (through the scenes in your story) how a male chauvinist is transformed. This goal (to transform a chauvinist) will determine your plot. 

If you just start to write without thinking this through, you might not come up with a classic like Tootsie.

How do you find the designing principle in your premise? 

You find the designing principle by teasing it out of the simple one-line premise you have before you. 

Don’t make the mistake most make. Instead of coming up with a unique design principle, they pick a genre and impose it on the premise, then force the story to hit the beats (events) typical of that genre. The result is mechanical, generic, unoriginal fiction.

There are many possible design principles or forms that you can glean from your premise to help you develop your story. The designing principle is neither one per idea nor is it fixed or predetermined. Each gives you different possibilities of what to say, and each brings inherent problems that you must solve.

Step 1. Write the premise line for the story you plan to write.

Step 2.

Look for What’s Possible

Now, let’s hear John:

“One of the biggest reasons writers fail at the premise stage is that they don’t know how to spot their story’s true potential. This takes experience as well as technique. What you’re looking for here is where the idea might go, and how it might blossom. Don’t jump on a single possibility right away, even if it looks really good.

Key Point: Explore your options. The intent here is to brainstorm the many different paths the idea can take and then choose the best one.

One technique of doing this is to see if anything is promised by the idea. Some ideas generate certain expectations, things that must happen to satisfy the audience if this idea were to play out in a full story. These ‘promises’ can lead you to the best option for developing the idea.

A more valuable technique for seeing what’s possible in the idea is to ask yourself, “What if…?” The ‘what if’ question leads to two places: your story idea and your mind. It helps you define what is allowed in the story and what is not. It also helps you explore your mind as it plays in this make-believe landscape.

“What if a male chauvinist was forced to pretend he was a woman just to land a job.” 

The point here is to let your mind go free. Don’t censor or judge yourself.”

“Step 3: Identify the Story Challenges and Problems

Each story has its own unique set of rules, or challenges, as well. These are particular problems that are deeply embedded in the idea, and you cannot escape them. Nor do you want to.

Most writers, if they identify the problems at all, do so after they’ve written the complete story. That’s fat-too late.

The trick is to learn how to spot inherent problems right at the premise line.

Mastering the key techniques of character, plot, theme, story world, symbol, and dialogue will help you dig out the difficulties in any idea.

Example of Designing Principles for popular movies

The Great Gatsby

Fitzgerald’s challenge is to show the American dream corrupted and reduced to a competition for fame and money. His problems are just as daunting. He must create narrative drive when the hero is someone else’s helper, make the audience care about shallow people, and somehow turn a small love story into a metaphor for America.

Beloved

The main challenge for Toni Morrison is to write a tale of slavery in which the hero is not portrayed as a victim. An ambitious story like this has numerous problems that must be solved: keeping the narrative drive in spite of constant jumps between past and present, making events in the distant past seem meaningful to an audience today, driving the plot with reactive characters, showing the effects of slavery on the minds of the people who lived it, demonstrating how its effects continue to punish years after the slavery is over.

Step 4: Find the Designing Principle

Given the problems and the promises inherent in your idea, you must now come up with an overall strategy for how you will tell your story. Your overall story strategy, stated in one line, is the designing principle of your story.

The designing principle helps you extend the premise into deep structure.

Key Point: The designing principle is what organizes the story as a whole.

It is the internal logic of the story, what makes the parts hang together organically so that the story becomes greater than the sum of its parts. It is what makes the story original.

The designing principle is difficult to see. And in truth, most stories don’t have one. They are standard stories, told generically. That’s the difference between a premise, which all stories have, and a designing principle–which only good stories have.

The premise is concrete; it’s what actually happens.

The designing principle is abstract; it is the deeper process going on in the story, told in an original way.

Designing principle = story process + original execution

The designing principle is the synthesizing idea, the shaping cause of the story. It’s what internally makes the story a single unit and what makes it different from all other stories.

Key Point: Find the designing principle, and stick to it. Be diligent in discovering this principle, and never take your eye off it during the long writing process.

Step 5. Determine Your Best Character in the Idea

Once you have a lock on the designing principle of your story, it’s time to focus on your hero.

Key Point: Always tell a story about your best character.

“Best” doesn’t mean “nicest”. It means “the most fascinating, challenging and complex,” even if that character isn’t particularly likable.

The reason you want to tell a story about your best character is that this is where your interest, and the audience’s interest, will inevitably go. You always want this character to drive the action.

Step 6. Get a Sense of the Central Conflict

Once you have an idea of who will drive the story, you want to figure out what your story is about at the most essential level. That means determining the central conflict of the story. Ask yourself “Who fights whom over what?” and answer the question in one succinct line. The answer to that is what your story is really about, because all conflict in the story will essentially boil down to this one issue.

Step 7: Get a Sense of the Single Cause-and-Effect Pathway

Every good, organic story has a single cause-and-effect pathway: A leads to B, which leads to C, and so on all the way to Z. This is the spine of the story. And if you don’t have a spine or you have too many spines, your story will fall apart.

Step 8. Determine Your Hero’s Possible Character Change

After the designing principle, the most important thing to glean from your premise line is the fundamental character change of your hero. This is what gives the audience the deepest satisfaction no matter what form the story takes, even when the character change is negative (e.g. The Godfather).

Character change is what your hero experiences by going through his struggle.

It can be represented as an equation.

Weakness x Action = Changed

W x A = C

Character with weaknesses x Basic Action = Changed Character

W = Weaknesses; it can be both psychological and moral

A = Struggle to accomplish the basic action in the middle of the story

C = Changes

In most stories, a character with weaknesses struggles to achieve something and ends up changed as a result.

The simple logic of a story works like this;

How does the act of struggling to do the basic action (A) lead the character to change from W to C?

Notice that basic action (A) is the fulcrum that balances W and C.

Key Point: The basic action should be the one action best able to force the character to deal with his weaknesses and change.

(This is the simple geometry of any story because it is the sequence of human growth)

The key to doing this is to start with the basic and then go to the opposites of that action. This will tell the audience who your hero is at the beginning and who he is at the end of the story (how he has changed).

Step 9: Figure Out the Hero’s Possible Moral Choice

The central theme of a story is often crystallized by a moral choice the hero must make, typically near the end of the story. Theme is your moral vision, and it is one of the main reasons you are writing your story.

Theme is best expressed through the structure of the story, through the moral argument.

Key Point: To be a true choice, your hero must either select one of two positive outcomes or, on rare occasions, avoid one of two negative outcomes.

Make options as equal as possible, with one seeming slightly better than the other.

An example of a choice between two positives is between love and honour. In A Farewell to Arms, the hero chooses love. In The Maltese Falcon, the hero chooses honour.

This technique is about finding possible moral choices. The choice you come up with now may change completely by the time you have written the full story.

This technique simply forces you to start thinking, in practical terms, about your theme from the very beginning of the writing process.

Step 10: Gauge the Audience Appeal

When you’ve done all your premise work, ask yourself one final question: Is this single storyline unique enough to interest a lot of people besides me?

This is the question of popularity, of commercial appeal. You must be ruthless in answering it.

You should always write first for yourself; write what you care about. But you shouldn’t write only for yourself.”

So we’ve seen the ten steps to shaping or crafting our stories. Let’s go back to step 4, the design principle, because it’s an abstract concept, and because it’s so crucial, probably where the hardest mental work lies. It’s where the real planning begins, where you carve out the blueprint of your story and begin to see the amount of work that needs to be done.

According to John, if your story doesn’t have a designing principle it’s likely going to be unoriginal, something patterned like what we’ve seen so many times already.

Let’s bring back something else John said:

“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.

Stories are really giving audiences a form of knowledge, emotional knowledge, but in a playful, entertaining way.”

(Thank you, John) This means you’ll have to give tell your story in scenes. Plan or plot out your stories through scenes you want to use in conveying the actions that will change, or try to change your main character.

You’ll be required to describe setting, show characters and capture their actions (and anything that creates the feeling of being in the moment). Your scenes should serve your story. You can get a piece of paper and write out the scenes before you start writing. It could be scenes that serve character development or some aspect of the plot that is crucial to appreciating the emotions you want readers to experience. If a scene does nothing significant for the story, get rid of it. Try to make your scenes count.

To refresh our minds a little.

What is the premise line?

• It is your story stated in one sentence.

• It is the simplest combination of character and plot.

Premise = some event that starts the action + some sense of main character + some sense of the outcome

Examples:

The Godfather

The youngest son of a Mafia family takes revenge on the men who shot his father and becomes the new Godfather.

Moonstruck

While her fiance visits his mother in Italy, a woman falls in love with the man’s brother.

What is the designing principle?

• It is the synthesizing idea,

• The shaping cause

• It is what internally makes the story a single unit.

• It is what makes your story different from all other stories.

It is an abstract concept–behind-the-scenes, if you like. The readers won’t see it like they see your premise line or your theme line. Only you the creator of the story, and those who know all about creating stories, will see it. That’s why it’s an abstract concept.

Designing Principle = story process + original execution

It’s a Wonderful Life

■ Designing Principle

Express the power of the individual by showing what a town, and a nation, would be like if one man had never lived.

■ Theme Line

A man’s riches come not from the money he makes but from the friends and family he serves.

■ Story World

Two different versions of the same small town in America.

■ Symbol Line

Small-town America through history.

Citizen Kane

■ Designing Principle

Use a number of storytellers to show that a man’s life can never be known.

■ Theme Line

A man who tries to force everyone to love him ends up alone.

■ Story World

The mansion and separate “kingdom” of a titan of America.

■ Symbol Line

One man’s life made physical—through such symbols as the paperweight, Xanadu, the news documentary, and the sled.

A Christmas Carol

■ Designing Principle

Trace the rebirth of a man by forcing him to view his past, his present, and his future over the course of one Christmas Eve.

■ Theme Line

A person lives a much happier life when he gives to others.

■ Story World

A nineteenth-century London counting house and three different homes—rich, middle-class, and poor—glimpsed in the past, present, and future.

■ Symbol Line

Ghosts from the past, present, and future result in a man’s rebirth at Christmas.

You can see from the above that the theme line is different from the premise line. The theme is the message, the moral lesson, or the big revelation (big catch) in the story stated in one sentence. And honestly, it’s from the theme line that you’ll know if you’ve done a good job at the design principle stage. The aha moment is related to the theme line. Your designing principle will determine how it should come and when it should come. This is important because if the lesson is missed or not well understood, e.g. you chose the wrong scenes and wrong actions to deliver the message you want to deliver, then who’s fooling who?

Practice: Take a story you’ve already written or, even better, one you plan to write and dissect it. Write out the premise line, design principle, story world and symbol line.