Formula in Writing

When I started getting serious about writing, one of my inspirations and resources was Dean Wesley Smith, a long-time author and writing teacher who has a lot of experience and knowledge about the field. I've had some brief correspondence with him, and his instructional courses are very helpful. Obviously, his writing style is different than mine (and so is his writing income). But he taught me some eye-opening things about how professional writers actually work.

One of the things he talked about was the incredible speed at which pulp writers could churn out material that sold, and sold well. Many of those writers used a formula in their plotting; they weren't always the same formulas, but they each had their own style and variation. And some of those writers talked about how their formulas worked and why they were successful.

Today, formula writing is looked down upon; it's too cliché, too generic, too predictable. Subversion of expectations is the game now, where a writer will take a basic plot and invert it into something else. The problem with that is, many of these writers are trying to subvert previous subversions, and it becomes this long chain of even more twists and inversions until the story is unrecognizable...and unreadable.

The problem isn't with the formula; the problem is with the writer's inability to use a formula in the way it was meant to be. Subverting a formula doesn't always make for a better story. If you have a headache, do you want to take aspirin and find out that the pharmacist subverted the formula to make something new? If the aspirin doesn't mitigate the headache, you're not going to be impressed, are you?

And here's the important part: Formulas sell. There's a reason that men like Erle Stanley Gardner, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert Howard, Rex Stout, Raymond Chandler, and hundreds of others sold and sold well in the era of the pulps. If you picked up an issue of Black Mask and saw Raymond Chandler's name on the cover, you knew what you were getting. If you saw Robert E. Howard's name on a copy of Weird Tales, you weren't going to expect a Game of Thrones-style story in there. It was going to be action, heroics, and entertainment. And it worked, over and over and over again.

"But formulas are derivative!" Sure they are. So what? Shakespeare is considered the greatest writer in English history, and he never came up with an original idea in his life. The basic plots all came into existence in the earliest days of literature; starting with the Epic of Gilgamesh, Egyptian and Greek myths, and even the Bible. Everything since those days builds on what was created back then. There's nothing original anymore, except for how the story is written. And there's nothing wrong with that.

The key to using a formula isn't to subvert it; the key is to use it in a fresh way that still sticks to the formula's basic format. Putting a twist at the end is fine, as long as it makes sense. But a lot of writing today focuses solely on the twist, making the story itself nothing more than a vehicle for the writer's cleverness. And a lot of these twists rely on characters acting completely out of character, or taking actions that exist solely to justify the twist, rather than the story.

Using these formulas, men like Lester Dent could write the same story fifty times in a year, using different characters and trappings, and sell each and every one of them to voracious readers. Because people read fiction to be entertained, not to be preached at or lectured to. When the story exists solely to force the reader to choke down a message, it's not going to be any fun to read, and it won't sell. It might win awards from like-minded writers, but it's not going to make money.

For those who want to make money as writers, that's an important lesson to internalize. Even the most clever twist or subversion isn't going to matter if the story doesn't work. Write for story, and write what people want to read. Fewer people are reading now than at any time since public schools began in the mid-19th century. Give them something entertaining to read, and that will change.