“Sounds like a formula to me.” | Jane Underwood

Jane Underwood

❝Interestingly, literary fiction is considered to be free of formulae. Sometimes, my students even insist that the difference between literary and genre fiction is that the former isn’t formulaic. But isn’t it? Don’t most literary stories start a scene, then introduce some back story, create primarily emotional conflicts, and then end only a few paragraphs after the protagonist experiences an epiphany. Sounds like a formula to me. Of course, there are an infinity of stories one can tell with this formula, or with subversions of the same. That’s true of literary fiction, definitely!❞

To Underwood’s blog entry, “On Formulas and Fiction”…