Meet John Truby author of The Anatomy of Genres and Leslie Lehr author of A Boob’s Life: How America’s Obsession Shaped Me…and You

Thursday October 24th  7:00 to 8:00 pm

Genre stories aren’t just a small subset of the films, books, TV shows, and video games that people consume. The storytelling game is won by mastering genres. They are the all-stars of the entertainment world, comprising the vast majority of popular stories worldwide. Knowing how to write genres is the most important skill in the storytelling industry—and the real secret of genres is that each one expresses a unique philosophy of how to live a good life, which is what readers and audiences really hunger for.

The Anatomy of Genres is a step-by-step guide to using these basic building blocks of the story world. Legendary writing teacher John Truby details the three ironclad rules of successful genre writing, and provides in-depth breakdowns of the fourteen major genres—Horror, Action, Myth, Memoir, Coming-of-Age, Science Fiction, Crime, Comedy, Western, Gangster, Fantasy, Thriller, Detective, and Love—as well as the essential plot events, or “beats,” that define each of them. The ability to sequence a genre’s beats in the right way, and then combine elements from different genres into the densest plot possible, is what separates stories that sell from those that don’t.

Truby’s first book, The Anatomy of Story, changed the way writers develop stories. The Anatomy of Genres shows writers how to tell their best stories, and through the power of fiction, how audiences can live their best lives.

John Truby is the founder and director of Truby’s Writers Studio. Over the past thirty years, he has taught more than fifty thousand students worldwide, including novelists, screenwriters, and TV writers. Together, these writers have generated more than fifteen billion dollars at the box office.

Leslie Lehr is the prize-winning author of A BOOB’S LIFE: HOW AMERICA’S OBSESSION SHAPED YOU… AND ME, the Women’s National Book Association “Great Group Read” featured in People Magazine, Glamour, Good Morning America, and a bestseller on Amazon. Her three novels include WHAT A MOTHER KNOWS, her nonfiction has been featured on Oprah, and she is a produced screenwriter. Leslie’s essays appear in Time, Newsweek, Writers Digest, and the New York Times MODERN LOVE column – read by Katie Couric on NPR. With a BA from USC film school and an MFA from Antioch, Leslie has taught in the Writers Program at UCLA and at conferences around the country. A breast cancer survivor with two daughters, she lives in Southern California as close to the beach as possible, with John Truby and their two cats.

 A Boob’s Life was optioned by Selma Hayek and is in development as a comic series for HBO Max.  Leslie also sold a spec script this year, a very hard thing to do in the present Hollywood climate.  She coaches writers of fiction and nonfiction in Truby’s techniques.