What is “Formula Fiction”?

I promised to indulge in some Profound Thoughts inspired by The Wild Grass and Other Stories. Maybe it was more a threat than a promise. Either way, you’ve been warned. Deep mojo.

Davin told me he would be curious to know my reaction to his stories since I do not regularly read literary fiction. It’s true; I don’t. I’ve even been known to dismiss literary fiction rather contemptuously as pretension and snobbery. But I’ve come to reconsider that position.

Interestingly, I’m gaining a new appreciation for literary fiction at a time when genre conventions are invading high literature. I think it should be noted that the appearance of a space ship or a vampire in a story doesn’t actually determine what kind of story it is. The formula, or narrative drive, to use a less value-laden term, determines that.

Is literary fiction superior to formula fiction? Or just different? Does it have a formula of its own? (Didn’t Virginia Woolf write a book about A Formula of One’s Own? and if Virginia Woolf said it, it must be true.)

Much modern and post-modern, self-consciously “literary” fiction rejects formulae but I think if you look at the classics, the formula is obvious. Or rather, it would be obvious if the formula were familiar to us; sometimes the alien quality of yesteryear’s cliches blind us to the fact that the writers of those areas dealt in tropes as much as contemporary authors. Indeed, I would argue, even more so. The characters in The Canterbury Tales are very much stock for their time. The brilliant innovation of The Canterbury Tales is not due to its lack of formula.

But what is “formula”? In my opinion, formula is just another word for story structure. All stories have it, with the possible exception of some experimental works that go out of their way not to, in the same way some modern art goes out of the way to eschew beauty. This is not to say that there is no difference between formulaic fiction and quality fiction, however. In formulaic fiction, the formula is all there is to the story, whereas beautiful literature transcends the form. In one case, the formula is all there is in the end, in the other, it is merely the starting point, a vessel to hold something else.

“Formula” is an ambiguous term, and I should define how I mean it. I will give a basic example, found across genres such as jokes and Three Act plays. It has three steps.

One: Protagonist does something wrong.
Two: Protagonist does something wrong again.
Three: Protagonist finally gets it right.