Elliot Kessler

I’ve seen a lot of people online complain about college courses on creative writing. I’ve heard them say that all they do is teach formulas and tell you how to do what other authors are already doing. There are other things that creative writing courses can give authors, such as connections with other authors, but that isn’t what this article is about. I want to talk about the validity of story formulas. I’ve heard people say that they’re essential to storytelling. I’ve also heard people say that they should be ignored. But which is it? Are formulas useful? Or should they be forgotten?

For formulas

When I first began writing stories, I would scribble short stories that lasted one to three pages. The stories weren’t good looking back at them (which I expected), but I had a ton of fun writing them. Eventually, I participated in a creative writing workshop-type event. That’s where I learned about the Eight-Point Arc formula, which changed how I wrote my short stories.

I started writing my stories by following the formula to the letter. A lot of my stories were still random ideas, scenes, and concepts that I thought would be cool, but my better stories were written by faithfully following the formula. I thought it was the greatest thing ever. I didn’t have to hope that my story would be fun to read. I knew it would be and didn’t have to worry about it. I began to get a little more ambitious and outlined some novels (which never came to fruition). It was around this time that I learned about Dan Harmon’s Story Circle, which is another writing formula. When I outlined my book ideas, I would either draw an arc and make notes for each of the eight major plot points or draw a circle and do the same but with the Story Circle formula.

I thought that’s how stories worked. I felt that authors were supposed to stick to formulas, and if they didn’t, they weren’t doing it right. Formulas were gospel to me, and I didn’t want to stray from them at all. If it weren’t for formulas, I would never have gotten as far as I have with creative writing. I would have either stopped a long time ago or continued to scribble garbage short stories in notebooks.

Formulas help new authors to understand story structure better. When it comes to creative writing, one learns by doing. I learned how to write good stories by writing good stories. I didn’t know how to write a good story until I did. Plot formulas are a way to help people learn what makes a story enjoyable. I needed the plot formulas I learned to point me in the right direction for writing. Otherwise, I would be writing nonsense and duplicating other stories I have read or watched. I wouldn’t be trying anything new. I would just do what everyone else does because I know it works. Fortunately, formulas gave me a way around that. I could plug in my own ideas while still doing what the experts do. I can make a space story that is my idea and my concept but still write it the way something like “Star Wars” was written. (For those that don’t know, George Lucas read Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero With a Thousand Faces” and wrote the first “Star Wars” movie by following Campbell’s Hero’s Journey formula, which is another great formula.)

Formulas helped me do things that I otherwise would never have figured out how to do. They propelled my writing to a level that would have taken much longer to reach otherwise. They helped me learn what it takes to write an entertaining story and pushed me in the right direction.

Against Formulas

Eventually, my writing got really stale, and crafting new stories wasn’t as fun for me anymore. Despite all these new ideas I had and stories I wanted to tell, it felt repetitive to plug my concept into a formula and watch what happened. I wanted to make something that was truly my own. I tried to stop doing what everyone else said worked for them, and I wanted to do what worked for me. I grew bored of formulas and grew out of them. I started writing stories by plotting them how I felt they needed to be plotted. I wrote and structured them how I felt they needed to be. Despite not following formulas for these stories, I think they turned out pretty good.

Obviously, they can’t all be winners. For instance, I wrote a story about a guy who got lost while hiking and ran into Bigfoot, and all Bigfoot wanted was to be accepted. As fun of an idea as it was, the story I wrote wasn’t as entertaining as I hoped it would be. But breaking free of formulas helped me to experiment and try things I had never seen done before. For instance, I wrote another short story about a group of college kids exploring the woods at night before they were attacked by a monster of some kind. As basic as that story sounds, I wanted to write it in a way that would be unique. So, instead of turning it into a traditional short story, I made the story read like a transcript of an audio file found on an audio recorder at the scene of the attack. Why was a group of college students exploring the woods at night with an audio recorder? I don’t know. But the idea of a whole story being made up purely of dialogue fascinated me (and still does), so I wrote it.

When I began to stray away from formulas, I found concepts, ideas, and storytelling methods that I had never conceived before, and I would never have thought of them if I had only stuck to how other people told me to write. I found my own voice and my own storytelling methods. Instead of plotting stories the way storytelling teachers told me to, I plotted stories the way the stories told me to. Each story had its own structure. It wasn’t made of a list of checkboxes. It was just how the stories were structured naturally.

I found myself as a writer only after I broke free from the constraints of formulas. That’s when stories didn’t feel the same anymore. I wasn’t going through the motions. I was thinking about every plot point and every story beat as I wrote, and I wasn’t making sure it aligned with the ideal story structure. Instead, I made sure it aligned with the story I wanted to tell.

Conclusion

There is no right or wrong way to write a story. If you use formulas for everything you do and can’t live without them, great. As I said earlier, the first “Star Wars” was written using Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey formula, so clearly, formulas work fine. But if you’ve never used a formula a day in your life and hate being constricted by rules and regulations that others impose on your creative work, that is also fine. There was a point where there were no formulas, and some of the best pieces of fiction originated from that period, such as the Sherlock Holmes stories.

I do think that when you are only beginning to dip into creative writing, you should learn story formulas to get you started. When you get bored or frustrated with formulas, that’s when it’s time to start thinking of them more as guidelines than actual rules.

There are alternatives to this as well. You can use things in life as formulas. I’ve seen the five stages of grief used as a structure for an episode of “Doctor Who,” and it’s one of my favorites. You can also “steal” a story structure from one of your favorite books or movies. When I say “steal,” that probably raises some red flags, but you’ll notice the quotations. That’s because you’re not actually stealing anything. You aren’t taking someone’s story and changing the names around to pass it off as your own. Instead, you’re taking another story’s structure, the main plot points, and applying them to your own ideas. This helps give your story a skeleton that you can build off of later.

There are so many ways to approach storytelling. Only you can find the method right for you; the only way to find it is by writing. So, good luck, write great stories, and, most importantly, have fun.

Thanks for reading! Have a fantastic day.