This is not another precept-filled guide on how to establish the plot, develop the characters, create empathy... No rules are given here, nor shortcuts promised to write well. Vanni Santoni is very honest with the reader, or rather the aspiring writer, to whom this witty and loving pamphlet is addressed: writing is not taught. And 'the reason is one, simple and peremptory: the infinite immensity of the possibilities of a narrative text implies that infinite things can be written in infinite ways'. There are no absolute rules. Great literature is not a sequence of movements that follow each other by default to obtain an effect, it is not a cold algorithm, but a field of possibilities, tensions and even contradictions.