Danielle Krage:

Today, I am very excited to have John Truby with me. I first came across John’s work when I read the Anatomy of Story and found it so incredibly helpful. And more recently, I have been deep diving into The Anatomy of Genres and recommending it to all my writer friends, no matter what genre they’re writing. And today, obviously, in line with the podcast, we’ll be digging into comedy specifically, which will be really, really fun. But John, before we start, is there anything else that people should know about you and your work?

John Truby:

Well, I’d say it’s just great to be here with you, Danielle. And I’ve been talking about comedy and trying to help writers be successful in comedy and film, TV, novels for over 30 years. And I’ve done that through, first of all, my Anatomy of Story course and book, which you just mentioned, my comedy course and sitcom courses, which… I have taught all over the world. And in fact, that was the first genre that I did a course for.

Danielle Krage:

Ooh.

John Truby:

That’s how much I love it. And it’s of course, one of the things I love about doing the comedy course is the clips are always fantastic. They’re always hilarious. So what’s not to like? But, and then of course, I’ve got… Story Software, my blockbuster Story Software, which also has comedy and sitcom add-ons. And my most recent one, The Anatomy of Genres, which has that chapter on comedy. I mean, the main thing I want people to understand about what I do is I’m all about technique. I’m all about very practical, specific techniques that somebody can use to translate their vision onto the page and make it work. So I’m looking forward to getting into that today.

Danielle Krage:

I really appreciate that. And I really appreciate in the chapter that you do cover fiction, TV series, you cover all those different formats and you really don’t shy away from some of the difficult questions about how a comedy actually functions differently to drama… where the beats are. I really appreciate that you’ve taken the time and care with that technique because I don’t think it’s all obvious and it’s taken me a long time to figure things out. And even then there were so many things…the book is full of my underlinings. So I wanted to start just on the. broadest level in that the subtitle for the chapter comedy says Manners and Morals. And those words have clearly been very carefully chosen by you. But for those who haven’t read the chapter, could you give us a bit of insight into what that means to you? Why comedy is that focus on manners and morals?

John Truby:

In the book, for every one of the genres, I talk about what the genre appears to be about and what it’s really about. And each one of the genres, one of the reasons why genres are so powerful and why genre stories make up over 99% of all stories worldwide in every medium. is because every genre is dealing with a deeper life philosophy. It’s expressing a deeper life philosophy through the theme. And this has been worked out over, in many cases, centuries and in case of myth, over thousands of years. And what most writers understand is that each genre is a plot system. What they usually do not understand is also a theme system. And while the reader reads that particular genre because they love the plot system that it expresses, and that’s why as the genre writer you have to hit all of those plot beats, what they’re really tuning in for is the deeper theme that expresses a life philosophy that they believe in and they want to live their life by.

Comedy has a life philosophy and a deeper subject that it deals with. That deeper subject is manners and morals. And it’s interesting in the book, I talk about comedy after crime. Crime is also about morality, but it’s about morality at the highest level, at the biggest level. Morality or immorality, that’s so great that it is criminal. And then the question is how… how can we create a society that is a moral society for all?

Comedy is also about morality, but it’s about practical morality. It’s about the morality of the everyday. And that is, you know, expressed in part in manners, in how we act toward each other, all the way from the most apparently superficial element of manners, which is courtesy, which is respecting another human being, all the way to just… when we come into conflict with someone else in our day-to-day life, how does that get solved? Comedy solves it, shows it being solved in a funny manner, but what it’s really looking at, at a deeper level, is how do you live and how do you live properly with other people?

Danielle Krage:

That’s wonderful. And for those that haven’t read the book yet, I also, there’s many ways to approach it, I’m sure, but I really benefited actually from starting at the beginning and working my way through. Even though there was part of me that was itching to get my fingers on the comedy chapter, I found it really fascinating how you built up the genres, and as you say, where comedy sits in relation to crime. I found how you distinguished those two and what they have in common and what they don’t, super interesting.

But thank you, that gives us a great insight into that. And I also loved that within the chapter, you talk about the deeper theme of comedy as being tolerance. And that wasn’t something that I’d heard any writer speak to before. I’ve heard people speak to the conflict and the kind of fights and the battles, but when you said that, it made sense to me as to why it’s one of the genres that I’m really drawn to. So I wondered if you could speak to that a little bit, what you meant by that.

John Truby:

Sure. Comedy is very different from all other genres in a number of ways. The first way it’s different from all other genres is the tone. The approach that all other story forms have is that the hero has a goal, which they go after with great passion, and they come into a lot of conflict over it. And they, in the act of achieving that goal, they gain a deeper lesson for themselves, but they also do something that is important, typically for, that it does something for the society. And the implication in all of the genres is that the world works. And it has a basic logic for how it works.

Comedy, on the other hand, is about how the world doesn’t work. It’s about all the different ways that it’s screwed up and all the different ways that we are screwed up, all the different flaws and foibles that we have, and it highlights that. And it says that the hero going after their goal, typically in comedy, they fail. The goal is they do not succeed in getting the desire. That in spite of that, somehow everything works out at the end. And in fact, society is even better off because of it. And so it’s almost like we’re better in spite of the attempts that we made. And this, of course, is the definition of irony. You get the opposite of what you desire in the story. But t the implication of that….Underneath that is if we’re all screwed up and nothing really works very well, but it all turns out fine in the end, then let’s not be so excited about it and think it’s all about us and if we don’t get this, it’s going to be a disaster and so on and so forth. It’s not that important.

I always remember the great Bill Murray line from God, I can’t remember the name of the movie now where he’s a camp counselor…and he, you know, they’re going up, they’re going against the camp in this contest. It’s kind of an Olympics contest. And after the first day, they’ve been just completely destroyed, by this other camp, the rich camp across the lake. And so Bill Murray gives his big coaches, pep talk to the kids and he says… It just doesn’t matter. Once he does that, he takes the pressure off them. And then of course the next day they’re fantastic and they win. And that’s kind of comedy in a nutshell. It doesn’t matter. Sure, you can go after what you want to go after, but don’t be so intense about it and thinking that if I don’t win, then everything’s going to be horrible for the rest of my life. And the implication of that is also that you want to be tolerant of other people because we all have these flaws.

I always say to people, we all have these secrets that we have, we’re trying to hide our weaknesses. And that’s what comedy is about. Comedy is about characters who put up facades to hide their flaws because they think that’s going to get them more success. In fact, what they have to learn over the course of it is When you strip away the facades and just show people who you really are, that’s much more successful because all of a sudden people realize, oh, he’s not trying to hide because we can all see each other’s flaws.

I always say to people now, there’s one wisdom I’ve learned is everybody knows what your flaws are, right? So you don’t need to try to hide them. We know what they are. At the end of a comedy, there’s this underlying sense of… be tolerant of everybody else. We’re all going through trouble. We’re all going through difficulty. We all have the things that we have to deal with and the flaws that we’ll probably never overcome completely. So be kind.

Danielle Krage:

Yeah, that’s lovely. And again, I haven’t heard people speak about comedy in quite that way. And actually, I think sometimes people talk about comedy in relation to cruelty. And I understand why, but that’s something that’s never really chimed with me. I understand some of the dynamics around that, but I think fundamentally, like you say, that kind of more generous approach to thinking about flaws sits much better with how I view the world too, and is why I’m really drawn to comedy. So I loved that you articulated it that way.

John Truby:

And that is a great point, Danielle, because in many ways in comedy, we have to get through the cruelty to get to the tolerance. That’s exactly the process thematically that we’re going through, because all comedy is based on dropping a character, diminishing a character in some way, and we laugh at that. It comes from this position of superiority and disdain, oh look, the guy fell down, he slipped on a banana peel, he fell down. I’m gonna laugh at him, he’s in pain, but you know, I just thought it was funny. So there’s always that inherent cruelty going on, but the great theme, the great self-revelation that the character typically gets in a good comedy is that element of tolerance that, you know, they’re a human being too and… why can’t I be nice to that person or at least understand them instead of being judgmental and hurtful to them?

Danielle Krage:

Yeah, yeah, I love that. And it’s a really appealing, interesting arc to me. And I think you’ve articulated it so well.

I also really love in relation to character that you talk about character and opponents. Lots of the screenwriting books I’ve read that are more general approaches to screenwriting…. We hear about the protagonist and the antagonist. Actually, I found it very helpful to think about opponents and the way that you described that. I wondered if you could speak to that a little bit more for those who haven’t read it yet.

John Truby:

That goes back to my original work in story, which is I very specifically did not want to use the typical terminology of protagonist and antagonist because I think it doesn’t, it’s not helpful in terms of what these characters are actually doing. And where I found that the term opponent, is more, it was at least helpful to me, to understand what that relationship is with the hero because that relationship is the most important relationship in any story. And we typically think of hero and opponent as these two separate characters, they’re in great conflict with each other and so on.

No, the trick, one of the tricks to story, is to understand they are in a very strong tight relationship and that in order to make the one character work, you have to make the other character work. And not, for example, see the opponent as a villain. It’s another term that I never use when I’m talking about the opponent, because that immediately diminishes the opponent, makes them less than human. And then not only does that hurt that character in terms of being able to express a full human being there, it actually hurts the hero because the hero is only as good as the person they fight. Because in the test of fighting against that opponent, as they each compete for the goal, that’s where the hero is forced to dig deep. Look at the deeper weakness that they have which is the generating element of any story. That’s the real problem we’re solving for is that internal weakness. So it’s the opponent. That’s why I always say, you as the writer, you should love this character because this character will do more to help you write a great story than any other character because they test the hero.

Danielle Krage:

Mm, I love that. So many things about that, that I think are incredibly helpful. And I think as well in the chapter, the way it gives more space to multiple opponents. That you’re not just dealing with that, like, singular villain, as you say, and them also being diminished, but it makes much more sense of how you have got that broader cast who are creating opposition in different ways. So I find that a really, really helpful term. Thank you.

John Truby:

And that’s, by the way, the foundation of what I consider to be the single most important technique. It’s really a set of a number of techniques, but the most important set of techniques in comedy, which is the four point opposition, because one of the biggest mistakes writers make in any story, but especially in comedy is they have that one main opponent, which is fine. But comedy is social.

Danielle Krage:

Mm.

John Truby:

It is always within a social setting, and it’s about not just the individual, it’s about the individual within the larger society, and how do you deal with other people in this moral world? And so that’s why it is so important for writers of comedy to have what I call a four-point opposition, and there’s a lot of different ways to do it. But one of them is you have a main opponent and you have two secondary opponents. But if you don’t have at least three that the character is dealing with, number one, you can’t generate enough laughs, you can’t create enough comedy, but also you can’t tell a full comic story which is based on somehow changing the relationship of that hero to the larger society.

Danielle Krage:

Yeah, that’s just perfect. It makes so much sense to me and it’s incredibly helpful to have this vocabulary and frameworks to hang things on. You kind of intuit from watching things, but sometimes still you can forget the crucial fundamentals. And in one chapter, in the context of the whole book too, you’ve really laid out so many important things that I just keep going back to to making sure I’m not getting off course.

Another of the terms, and again, I appreciate that you’ve put so much care into these terms. They’re just great visually too, is the comic cyclone. Because before that, I’d kind of absorbed different language around the showdown or the firework scene. And all of those are great in their own way, but I love the comic cyclone because there’s so much embedded in it that really matters for comedy. So I wondered if you could speak to that a little bit.

John Truby:

Well, you know, it’s a great question because underneath that question is the fundamental problem that almost all writers have writing any genre, but especially comedy, which is how do you sequence the beats so that the comedy builds. And this comes from what I consider to be the biggest mistake that writers make when they first approach the idea of a comic idea, story idea, that they’re going to write. If they have a background in comedy, they will often approach it from the point of view of the joke, which is the micro level of the comedy story. And that’s often how they got interested in comedy. You know, they’re a funny person. They tell jokes or they make people laugh. But that’s a split second. And so what they do is they try, they say, okay, now I’m going to write a comedy screenplay.

And so they think, well, I’m going to just jam as many jokes in from the very first page as I can. Well, you’ve just got hit the kiss of death right there. You’re, you’re dead at that point because what you don’t realize is that a joke is a momentary explosion. And we laugh, but what that joke is doing is it is stopping the narrative drive. And if you do a lot of jokes from the very beginning, you do not set up the narrative drive for the overall story. And so this is why so many comedies, even comedy films that we see, they get out there, they’re funny for the first 10, 15 minutes, and then suddenly they’re not funny anymore.

And you know, the question is always, well, did they just forget how to make people laugh? No, what they didn’t know is how do you write a comedy story? And that’s why comic story structures are the key to story. And that’s why in the comedy chapter, I talk about, you know, you can’t just, and this is from years of experience I’ve had with comedy writers…. They say, I’m writing a comedy. And the first question I always ask them is what kind?

Danielle Krage:

Mm.

John Truby:

Because writing a romantic comedy is very different from an action comedy, which is different from a buddy’s story, which is different from a farce, which is different from a satire, and so on and so forth. Entirely different beats. And it’s those beats and the sequence of those beats that determines the success of the story. That structure, that sequence of story beats is what you then hang the jokes on. What I call in the chapter, the clothesline. You are literally hanging the jokes on the storyline and that storyline is determined by the specific comic structure, the sub genre that you’re using. And if you don’t know what that substructure is and you don’t know the beats and how they sequence, you’ve got no chance.

Danielle Krage:

That’s absolutely right. And I appreciate that you’re so clear about that. And the book is so helpful in relation to that. And you also make space for people who might like… to sort of play devil’s advocate…say, oh, that’s too restrictive. Because in the chapter, you make it so clear how there are these different sub-genres, and how also successful writers are looking at ways to mix genres, but you still need to know the ingredients that go into doing that.

And I wondered if we could pull out one example for that, for people who may not have read the book yet and are thinking, what do they mean? And that’s…I was fascinated by the fact that you talk about combining horror and comedy. And recently on the podcast, I interviewed Zanandi Botes, who’s a fabulous writer for cracked.com. And she analyzes lots of films. And one of the things that she really loves, and we talked about in the conversation was her extreme love for horror comedy and how- she just really felt like those two genres play really well together.

And I was fascinated that you also mentioned too, that that can be a great combination. So I wondered if we could dig into that a little bit for people who might be thinking, oh, but you know, I want to bring this in, I want to bring this in…. How you would think about combining genres like that.

John Truby:

It’s another great question and it’s essential for writers to understand in the current story business. And by that I mean every medium, every genre worldwide. In the opening chapter, I talk about three rules that determine the story business today. The first of these is that it’s a genre world. Ninety nine plus percent of all stories are at least one genre. And that leads to rule number two, which is that we almost never have single genre stories anymore in any medium. It’s almost always a mix of two, three, even four genres.

Now, why is that so important? Why is the business demanding that from us as writers? It’s because stories have become more plot dense, denser plot. And what that means is, let’s say in film, you got two hours, unless you’re James Cameron, you’re only given two hours to work with. So the question is, if everybody else is writing a comedy and you’re writing your comedy, how are you gonna separate yourself out from the crowd? Well, what the business is saying is, Just the beats, the 15 to 20 beats of that one genre aren’t enough. It’s not enough plot density. So we mix two, three or four. And it goes back to the old marketing idea of give them two for the price of one. But now in story it’s give three, give them four for the price of one.

And what is the great value of that? You are doubling, tripling the number of plot beats in the story. And this is huge. This is the whole game. And so you need to be mixing genres. It’s also important because, again, this is a way you separate yourself out from the crowd. If you’re just doing a comedy and that’s all it is, then how are you gonna differentiate yourself from everybody else who’s just doing comedy? But if you combine it with one or more other genres, especially genres that are not usually combined with comedy, then all of a sudden your story stands out. Whoa, I haven’t seen this before. And so you get the effect, what I refer to as ….the reader gets to have their cake and eat it too. They get the genre beats that they love, right? That have to be in there or you’re not doing that genre. Right?

So to those people in your audience who say, well, I don’t wanna follow those rules. Well, okay, no, nobody does. But you don’t follow those beats, it’s not that genre. And people who love that genre, who come back to that genre again and again, will say, this sucks, because it doesn’t have what I need to see for me to come to a movie in the comedy form. So you get to have your cake, which is you give them those beats, but now you give them a lot more, which is you give them beats from another genre. And comedy and horror, even though they, under the surface, have a lot of really interesting structural similarities, on the surface, they’re quite different and in many ways opposite. And so this is why, even though we’ve had some comic horror stories, we don’t have a lot of them, because they’re very tough to mix.

And this leads to another problem. Which is, you know, whenever I say to people, look, you need to mix two, three, four genres, they say, great, and then they go try to do that and they end up with story chaos. Because if you don’t know how to mix them, then you get big problems structurally. Too many heroes, too many opponents, too many plot beats that don’t sequence properly and so on and so forth.

So you’ve got to…you know, there’s a reason that comedy and horror aren’t done together very often. It’s because in certain ways, they do not like to be together. So unless you know how to combine them…Comedy and crime is another one. And those two as examples, what do they have in common? Well, it’s the fact that what we talked about from the very beginning, which is that… Comedy is ultimately about tolerance. It’s ultimately about… everything is going to work out OK. Well, in crime and in horror, it doesn’t work out OK.

Danielle Krage:

No.

John Truby:

People get killed, right? And they don’t come back unless they come back as a monster. So the point is, and at the beginning of the comedy chapter, I talk about the fact that laughter comes when we drop a character, but not too much. If somebody slips on a banana peel and they fall on their butt, that’s funny. If they slip on a banana peel and fall and hit their head and die, that’s not funny. So this problem of tone becomes very important when you’re mixing comedy with other forms. And that’s why black comedy, which is one of the two major ways you transcend the form, advanced comic forms, black comedy and satire, both really hard to write… In the case of black comedy, it’s because again, you’re combining comedy with people dying, and that’s really hard to do.

Danielle Krage:

Yeah, I agree. And when you’re working with writers, you’ve worked with so many writers, and this is a broad question, so come at it, whichever way you want to…when they are struggling with that tone. What do you send them back to first, as like first order of business in going through the script? If the tone is off, it’s not working? So we have all these things, we know it’s off, we know it’s not quite right, but…. actually fixing that kind of thing can be quite the headache. So what do you send them through…almost like a diagnostic tree of where to at least start for the tone being off.

John Truby:

This goes to the question of when you’re rewriting a story. And rewriting is one of the trickiest things to do in all of storytelling. You know, we’ve all heard this writing is rewriting and so on and so forth. And in fact, it is hiding a dirty little secret that writers do not like to talk about. And they think only they have the problem, which is for most writers, the second draft is worse than the first.

Danielle Krage:

Mm.

John Truby:

And why is that? Well, there’s a lot of reasons. One is that they don’t realize that rewriting is a set of skills, just like plot, character, and so on. It’s a set of skills, a set of techniques. One of the main techniques in rewriting, if you want to rewrite a story and have it be better in the second draft than the first, is the order that you rewrite.

And what is, what am I talking about most obviously? The biggest mistake that most writers make in rewriting a story is they go to page one and they start rewriting the scene and fixing the dialogue. That is the last thing you wanna do, not the first, the last thing you wanna do. The first thing you need to do when you rewrite, and this is true in comedy and every other genre, is you fix the structural flaws first.

And… what are the structural flaws I’m talking about? You start off with the structural flaws at the beginning and the structural flaws at the end. Specifically, you go to the, what is the main weakness, the deep foible flaw of this character? Have I established it correctly? Second, what is the desire of this character? And desire is where most of them go wrong, especially when it comes to the problem of tone. One of the techniques that I talk about in the book is that… You want to give your hero a desire that gets them into trouble. In other words, you’re not just imposing an attack from the outside. Yeah, that’s going to happen. But it’s absolutely crucial that the goal that they come up with, that they’re going to track for the whole story, gets them into trouble. It’s their own fault.

Right. And then it will escalate over the course of the story as these other opponents, you know, chime in and are also competing for the same goal. So the first thing I check on is…did you set up a goal that will extend all the way to the end of the story that gets the person in progressively deeper trouble? Now, if you do that, then the question is, in terms of tone is, what kind of trouble are they getting into?

Danielle Krage:

Hmm.

John Truby:

As I said, if you, give them too much trouble in the sense of, you know, they’re facing death, then you got a real tone problem. And unless you’re doing a black comedy or a crime comedy, which is quite rare, um, you’re going to have big problems. You will not solve that tone problem. Yes, you want an opponent who is, can provide danger in some way, but it’s what kind of danger. And that’s why in comedy, which, as I mentioned, is a social form, The biggest danger that you see is social danger. Mass embarrassment, loss of status, embarrassment in terms, for example, romantic comedy, embarrassment in trying to win the interest of the other person. These kinds of things that are in a social world are worse than death.

You know, so if you can keep it within that realm, then you’re not going to have the tone problem. The other thing that you do, just to finish off with the rewriting is you then go to the end point of the story, the structural end point. The structural end point of that story is the self-revelation. What does the hero learn about themselves in terms of how have I been wrong over the course of this story, both psychologically in terms of how I’ve been thinking about myself? And how have I been hiding from my flaw? Also morally…. How have I been? And this is very important in comedy. How have I been acting immorally toward other people? And how do I have to change that? So that’s where if you fix those things, the tonal problem is one of the symptoms that will automatically get fixed if you fix those deeper structural problems.

Danielle Krage:

Oh my goodness, that’s just full of such helpful wisdom and advice and could have saved me many drafts and much pain in previous projects. I’m really glad that I found your work. And I will.. I always listen back to these podcasts, and that’s the section that I’m going to come back to and come back to because it, you hear these things like… get a character progressively deeper into crisis, but again, it’s so easy to forget when you’re like….oh, but this funny thing could happen… or wouldn’t it be cool if they did this? But is it really doing it? And the way that, as you said, that you’ve attached to the morality, it just gives such a fundamental framework. And again, even I hear you talking, I’m like, I need to go back and check my ending structurally to make sure that I’m doing that.

John Truby:

Well, especially Danielle in comedy, where we almost always think of the hero as being put upon. They’re typically a nerd, they’re typically of lesser status, and they’re being dumped on by this larger society, and especially typically the main opponent is a figure of authority. And

so you’ve got this imbalance of power. And so writers tend to set it up with this kind of opposition, four-point opposition, and they forget if you don’t create that initial desire line where the hero is there, and it’s their own fault that they’re having all this trouble. It’s not the other people’s fault. It’s my fault. If you don’t set that up, then it’s just a victim’s story and you don’t want that.

Danielle Krage:

A hundred percent. I completely agree. As you say it’s just worth reminding ourselves … because we do sometimes create these sort of nerdy or oddball characters and it can be like…. Oh, this happens to them. This happens to them. And that’s not the point. So I love that you say it so clearly and unequivocally. It’s incredibly helpful.

You’ve given so much really great practical advice today. So thank you so much for that. I’d love to know if there’s any advice that you’ve ever been given, that you found helpful. Because when I look at something like The Anatomy of Genres, it is such an epic piece of work in the sense of the amount of thought that’s gone into it. We talk about, peoplle will say about a writing a book being like a marathon, but I’m like….this is like, I don’t know, Six Iron Mans or something in terms of running across the desert to do it. So I’m curious whether there’s anything that helps you as a writer.

John Truby:

You know, that’s a deep question because you would not know this, but that’s actually the source of not only this book, but the Anatomy of Story book. And all the work, my entire career of working in story. It’s the fact that when I started, none of this information was available in a book. And I had to self-teach. And I had to… And in a way, I had no other…I didn’t have a mentor. I had no other way of learning these techniques because they weren’t expressed as techniques. I mean, occasionally you’d see these, you know, old time books that have these classical theories of story, you know, going all the way back to Aristotle. You know, Aristotle’s fantastic. He’s the greatest philosopher in history. But. you won’t get practical techniques in Aristotle and his poetics. So I had to self-teach. And that took me about 10 years, 10 years of not only trial and error of my own, but also the first three years of my life after college were spent in a movie theater, in an art house cinema watching two movies a day taking notes. And these were classic films. These are considered great films. Everybody knew these are the great films. And so my technique was… take notes, figure out what works, what doesn’t work, and what works, why.

And so that took, that process took about 10 years. So when I finally went to write the Anatomy of Story and do the Anatomy of Story course, my one goal. from the very beginning was, I wanna put all the techniques, professional techniques, that a writer would need to know in order to be successful at the professional level. And so that’s why it’s a big book. It’s not as big as this book, but it’s a big book. But it’s always been the hallmark of my belief, which is that story theory is all very interesting, especially if you’re a story geek like me, it’s all very interesting. But unless you can translate that into specific practical techniques that I, the writer, can apply to my story, it’s worthless. And so it was the fact that I didn’t get any advice. I didn’t get any help at all that has motivated me ever since.

Danielle Krage:

Well, I think that’s a lovely place to end. And I would love to say a massive thank you from me for writing them. I really appreciate your work. It’s incredibly generous. It’s so practical. And I, as I say, I…as soon as The Anatomy of Genres came out, I read it, took notes, started going genre by genre, watching examples from the genre. I printed out all the beats and then tried to check against them and then underlined. And then when it got to comedy as well, so deliciously helpful, because that’s the genre that I’m writing in. And I go back to it. It’s literally on the shelf. I’m not in my office at the moment, but it’s on the shelf right here. So I can just reach back, pull it out, look at a bit, reach back, pull it out, look at a bit. So it’s, it’s like a friend that has really helped me already. And as I say, I’ve recommended it to lots of my writer friends too.

John Truby:

Danielle, you have made my day because that is exactly how I hope all writers will use this book. Because it’s all about, I know the dream that writers have to express themselves and get their vision out on the page. And I know how hard it is. And so to hear you say that this has been very practical and helpful for you to be able to do that, That’s why I do what I do. So I’m so happy to hear that. And I thank you so much for having me on your show.

Danielle Krage:

Oh, wonderful. And I do say that as someone who didn’t start like that, who started thinking, oh, I love books, I can do this. And then really came up against and ran into so many walls and then wised up a little bit and was like…I need to figure this out, I need some help. So I’m glad you were there as that mentor to help.

So for people who haven’t read your books, I highly, highly recommend that you get them. Where should they go to find out more about you and your work? And of course, this will also go in the show notes.

John Truby:

Sure, for those who are interested in getting the book, The Anatomy of Genres, just go to this website, anatomyofgenres.com, all one word, anatomyofgenres.com. You’ll have various bookstores where you can get the book there. If you’re interested in story classes, for example, the comedy class, story classes and story software, just go to my website, which is truby.com.

Danielle Krage:

Wonderful. Thank you so much for your time today, John. I really appreciate it.

John Truby:

My pleasure. Thank you, Danielle. Appreciate it so much.