Book Review: The Anatomy of Genres
If you want to improve your basic writing skills, the good news is that there are many good books and classes you can avail yourself of. In fact, a lot of books and classes teach slight variations on the same advice. This is another piece of good news: if you have a choice between two or more classes, then as long as you have an engaged teacher, enthusiastic classmates, frequent assignments, and a system of robust, edifying feedback (i.e. workshops), then one is as good as another.
But what if you want to write better science fiction stories? Horror novels? Romance or western or gangster? Where do you go to learn about genre writing?
One may be surprised (as I once was) to learn of the important of genre-savviness for writers and editors. This is at least the case for those who want to appeal to a big publisher, and perhaps even for those who plan to publish independently. Unfortunately, your run of the mill college writing course or graduate program is not going to bother with genre. In fact, they may consider ignorance of genre to be a point of pride. So other than reading in your area of interest, how can you gain knowledge?
Happily, today you can discover niche courses in places like Masterclass and BBCMaestro. More to the point of this review, the library of instructional genre books keeps growing, and a fine entry on the shelf is John Truby’s The Anatomy of Genres, which was published in 2022.
Truby founded and for thirty years has run a writer’s studio. He is also a regular Hollywood consultant. The depth and breadth of his experience is emphatically on display in his book.
The Anatomy of Genres is big—at 700 pages, it is certainly the largest of all the books on writing I’ve ever read. Its subject matter is vast, and its objective ambitious: the author surveys fourteen genres as he endeavors to classify all of storytelling, traveling from horror to memoir to comedy to romance. And during this tour of the solar system of story types, Truby’s enthusiasm never flags.
Truby naturally divides the material on the basis of genre. He combines forms only a couple of times; memoir is put with coming-of-age (one might argue that the latter is a subset of the former) and detective with thriller, but for the most part each form gets its own chapter. This means that a writer who is mainly interested in learning about fantasy, for instance, need only flip to chapter 11.
The book asserts that there is a boilerplate recipe to all stories. For each genre, Truby identifies the particular ingredients that make the recipe special in that case. He first provides a snapshot of the genre, then the worldview it asserts (he terms this the “mind-action story view”), and then compares the genre to its brethren to locate it in the larger universe of storytelling. Having established this big picture, Truby enumerates a genre’s peculiar “story beats,” including special considerations of setting, types of characters, patterns of engagement between characters and world, along with motivations, complications, and other elements of plot. Truby also explores the storytelling models he considers normative to a given genre. As an added bonus, for each genre, he explores alternative forms that can subvert or elevate that genre, and usually provides examples from books and films to illustrate.
I believe this book is a great starter resource for any writer aspiring to work in genres, not only for the rich survey of genres which it offers but for its abundance of enthusiasm.
There is a point in the book where Truby refers to it as his life’s work. The passion and focus that his vision must have required show.
If the book has weaknesses, I believe they are Truby’s penchant for bespoke terminology and the fact that the book’s skeleton does not appear quite equal to the task of supporting the voluminous anatomical features hanging upon those bones.
Regarding terminology, this might have been solved by more normative word choices or else by a glossary. For instance, I don’t understand why Truby chooses to use the phrase “mind-action story view” instead of something more recognizable like “worldview.” He may have had special reasons for employing exotic phrases, but a reference section would have been helpful.
More importantly, the structure of the “lessons” is not as lucid as a project so expansive and yet so detailed deserves. While on one level this book is a work of art—the author’s own grand theory of storytelling—on a more basic and crucial level, it is pedagogical. But because most people are reading without the benefit of an instructor, the burden lies on the text to make its train of thought abundantly clear.
The book’s challenges seem partly to be a matter of organization and partly a matter of design.
These matters speak, in turn, to a larger question of just how big any author wants to let their vision get and how much trouble they are willing to go to in order to see that vision achieve its finest form.
What follows is a nerdy digression into the construction of the book, one which I welcome you to read, but if you want the tl;dr version, then it is this:
The “recipes” in this book do not lend themselves to ready reference. While I am confident you can glean a lot of knowledge from this book on your genre of choice, I don’t find this book very accessible in terms of mapping out your writing strategy or checking to make sure you are staying on track. Instead, organizing what you glean from this book is a job that will fall to you.
For those who like the nerdy digressions, here is a more detailed explanation.
In the chapter on science fiction, for example, there is a subheading titled “Science Fiction Story Beats.” This is printed in bold and appears to be about 16 pt font. Not far below is a sub-subheading, also in bold and in 14 pt font, but this time using small capitals, “SCIENCE FICTION STORY BEAT: Story World.” So far I have no issues with this; usage of small caps notwithstanding, the levels of organization are at least distinct even if the relative levels of emphasis are a bit unintuitive. We run into a problem on the next page, when we dive one level deeper into subdivisions of “Story World,” but this sub-sub-subheader is in 14pt bold and underlined. For the average reader who is trying to track what level of the hierarchy we are on, the hierarchy of ideas has become visually complicated, not only because the sub-sub-subheader is the same size, font, and weight as the level above it but more importantly because this lower level has higher-emphasis formatting (i.e., underlining). There will be yet another sub-level below this sub-sub-subheader on the next page, and on this fourth level down from where we started (and for an item that might have been more appropriate for a sidebar, “TECHNIQUE”) the text once again uses 14pt bold small caps.
On top of the challenges that visual formatting poses to readers, there is a question of how well the information in a chapter is organized for readers to digest. Recall that we are learning about the story beats of science fiction. The first story beat, “Story World,” is named on page 246. The next story beat is not named until page 270: “Minor Characters—Creating Society and System.”
I perceive several problems here. First, what do these labels mean? I give “story world” points for being memorable, but “minor characters…,” is another bit of rarified vocabulary. Neither heading triggers recollection of particulars for someone wishing to construct a science fiction story.
Second, what exactly a beat is in Truby’s mind or what rates as a beat does not follow an identifiable pattern. Upon further review, I discovered that critical story elements like plot and main character were (partly) subordinated to “Story World” and not identified as beats. And the discussion of these matters is framed within an extended examination of various social models at various stages of social development as seen through the lens of Irwin Thompson’s Four Pillars. The information is all quite interesting, and the author reassures us that it is all relevant to science fiction, but if I am an aspiring author in that realm seeking a formula, I am bound to get a bit lost.
Third, and speaking again in light of formula, the order of presentation and hierarchy of genre elements can be difficult to follow. The plainly-labeled beat “Story World” actually encompasses not just setting but “Rules of the Universe” (by which Truby means scientific, physical rules), “Society-Culture” (the aforementioned unpacking of social models, along with side observations about fractal structures in writing), and then “Hero-Story” (which sketches the sorts of plots a main character in a sci-fi story might experience). Compounding the confusion, Truby revisits society in the “Minor Characters…” beat, and comes back numerous times to plot, sometimes explicitly (“Plot—Subworlds,” which seems to actually be an element of setting) but more often implicitly (“Plan”, “Reveal”, “Battle”, and so on are all aspects of plot but none of these beats are labeled with the term “plot”).
All of this is not precisely easily solved due to the sheer complexity of the text. Still, a few things could have helped. What constitutes a beat might have been explained in the opening chapter. The information in each ensuing chapter could have been ordered more clearly and labeled a bit more rigorously and intuitively. Fonts and emphasis could have been applied in such a way that lower levels of the outline had progressively smaller font sizes and fewer embellishments. But more than any of these things, I think every genre discussion would have benefited from a rigorous outline, provided either at the beginning or the end of each chapter.
Okay, geek-critique over. To return to the wider view, I wish to reemphasize my admiration and gratitude that Mr. Truby undertook this feat of love, research, focus, and composition. I will also repeat my conviction that this book is, in my estimation, a fantastic resource, not only for writers but for students of literature in general and of life, for all the interesting insights which it offers into how story forms illuminate the everyday world.
To the extent that I point out the book’s weaknesses, I only wish to prepare eager writers for the challenge which faces them as they reap information about their genre of choice. I absolutely encourage them to use this book; I also advise them to do so with their wits about them and a notebook or laptop nearby for taking notes. Make your own map out of the pieces you find here!
In closing, I offer the truism that in any project, creative or otherwise, there will be tradeoffs. Truby desired to go both deep and wide. In the end, his topography came out splendidly, but at the cost of coherence in his maps of the depths. Perhaps this makes The Anatomy of Genres an unselfconscious test case for a fifteenth genre: the how-to book.