Just Stick to the Formula, Asshole!

In fiction, people often claim there are only so many plots available--here is a look at anything from one to thirty-six plots that may be available to you as a budding writer. Here is the formula for the one plot approach: Exposition - Rising Action - Climax - Falling Action - Denouement.

Finding different formulas is pretty easy on the internet. There you can find formulas for fiction (here and here), formula for humor, romance fiction, the perfect Hollywood script, formula for a good life and even a perfect butt!

The sad thing is not that executives in the music, TV, and movie industries have bought into the formula racket. The sad thing is that the news media pundits and ordinary people are buying into it. If you want the public to see things a certain way, just spin the news to fit a certain formula, et voila! People get the picture you want them to get.

I remember an episode of the TV series "Northern Exposure," where the Inuit shaman went from one Anglo Alaskan to another, trying to get them to tell him a mythic story from Anglo culture. Inuits and other native peoples all have traditional mythic stories that once shaped their lives and paradigms of the world. The shaman was disappointed that none of the Anglos seemed to have a story to tell him.

Of course, anybody but a TV script writer would know that the Anglo mythic stories of modern times are the movies. Best-selling novels of course, but who reads these days? If the book is not made into a movie, most people won't have heard of it. Movies are our stories--our paradigms--and movies are made strictly according to formula.

What I'm saying is, you are living a formula, whether you know it or not. And your strings are showing. Not just anybody can pull them, mind you, but there are a lot of people out there who can.

Have you not found yourself--do you not know "who you are?" How sad for you--you haven't found your formula. Stick in there, and if you are lucky, that formula will come along.

What would it take for a society to develop citizens who were independent-minded, and original? High intelligence? Sorry, that won't quite cut it. High intelligence plus self-discipline? Much better, but not quite there yet. High intelligence, self-discipline, and the wisdom of experience and perspective? Okay, I'll buy that.

How can a society escape its own formulaic traps and prisons? First it has to want to. I see no evidence of that, from what I can see in the media and institutions of society. So instead of seriously considering what I am trying to say, you might just stick to the formula, asshole! Or so most people would probably tell you. Maybe they're right. I like to think not.