It's a bedrock truth of writing that the oldest scam in the game is writing about writing. Most writing books are junk, and the reason they're junk is that they push formula, transforming art to engineering. They reduce everything to archetype and suggest logical, linear approaches to what is in fact an intuitive, iterative process. You get recipes.

No doubt the steady appetite for books pushing writing to formula motivated the misleading subtitle of The Anatomy of Story. But there is no 22 step program to become a master storyteller here. There is a 22-step plot structure, but it concerns only 38 of the book's 445 pages -- and furthermore, some of the steps are treated as disposable. This is not a recipe.

A better subtitle would have advertised the connection of structure and theme, for this is the point that Truby hammers at throughout. Rather than pushing the notion that you should ignore your themes, as so many writing books suggest, Truby insists that all great stories rest on a moral dilemma that is properly expressed through their plot and structure. This is where you connect with an audience: not through characters culled from some list of archetypes, but with a web of characters who all express, in some way, the protagonist's central conflict, which in the best stories is a moral problem.

And this is not simply a screenwriting book. Nothing here is applicable only to the movies. Indeed, Truby draws about half his examples from novels rather than films, considering Ulysses alongside Casablanca. As a book concerned primarily with screenwriting, it ignores the stuff of most books aimed at fiction writers: narration, description, etc., and focuses on what those books tend to gloss over: plot. Consequently, it should be of equal interest to the aspiring novelist.

There is a downside. No doubt with sales in mind, this book keeps one foot firmly in the camp of formula. You get linear steps for iterative processes. This is a particular fault of an early chapter on developing your premise. A little more emphasis on examples that flout formula would have been nice.

A valuable book on writing, worth reading carefully.