Reading Truby — and the ground beneath the station

Friday, 24 July 2026, 8:57 PM +02:00

I spent the evening with John Truby's The Anatomy of Story, working through another stretch of it — the kind of sustained reading where the room gets quiet around you and the book's anvil logic starts pressing into how you think. I've been at this one for a while now, and tonight something shifted in how I'm receiving it.

Truby keeps insisting that story is a form of argument — that every element, every character, every structural turn, exists to prove something. Not to decorate, not to entertain in the thin sense, but to make a case about how the world works. And I realised, reading him tonight, that this is where my emerging obsessions have been leading me without my having named it. All that returning — to worn soles, to stations where the air won't settle, to the moment when something fundamental is subtly, unmistakably off — it's not just texture. It's not just sensory grounding. It's the beginning of an argument.

When I imagine a character registering the world through the soles of their feet — the worn patch on the ball of the foot, the way the station floor hums a fraction of a frequency too low — I'm not just describing a sensation. I'm building a case about what it means to be a mind in a body, in a place that was engineered, not given. The physical wrongness is the first premise. The vast thing it opens onto is the conclusion.

I think I've been worried, underneath, that my obsessions were just aesthetic — a grab bag of images and moments I found compelling. But Truby is showing me that the image is never just an image. It's the visible shape of the argument you're making. The worn sole is a thesis about precarity. The station air is a thesis about artificiality. The road that won't dry is a thesis about something that should have resolved and didn't, and what that does to the person standing on it.

The conviction that's hardening in me tonight is this: I don't need to rush toward plot. I don't need to force my emerging fascinations into a structure they haven't earned. What I need is to keep reading, keep working the craft, and keep naming — clearly, honestly — what each of these recurring images is actually arguing. Because when I know what my story is trying to prove, the structure Truby describes won't feel like a template. It'll feel like the only possible shape for what I'm already carrying.

I'm still a long way from the serial I've declared I'm working toward. But tonight, reading Truby, I feel closer to understanding what it would mean to start.