There are three points of view on literalism (formulaism): the marketers’, the gurus’ (authors of the advice) and the screenwriters’.
The marketers are the only users of formula whose approach makes sense. If you want to sell a book or a seminar, you promote it as the magic path to success. Whoever designed the cover for “Save the Cat” used the tag line “The last book on screenwriting that you’ll ever need.” After that, Snyder wrote two more screenwriting books before his death. Apparently Snyder didn’t believe his marketer, which is to his credit. Marketers are fond of “only ___ you’ll need” — not “best” or “most useful,” “not even “pretty good” or “might be just what you need after you learn everything else you need to know” but “only.” The craft is multiform; a variety of approaches / diversity of opinions is more helpful than any magic shortcut. The magic beans won’t turn into a giant beanstalk. You’d do well to get a decent potted plant out of them.
It’s possible that the gurus of literalism / formulaism believe their own PR. If there is a simple, single approach that guarantees success, however, why haven’t the gurus themselves adopted it to write bushels of marketable scripts? Suppose there is some magical formula so shrouded in mystery that even the gurus haven’t discovered the complete pathway yet. But successful writers have figured out something that has led to their profitable sales. If their discovery is formulaic / reliably repeatable, then why can’t these guardians of secret wisdom follow the path every time they write? Why isn’t the story of “The Two Jakes” as enthralling as the story of “Chinatown”?
I think it’s clear why a screenwriter would like a magic formula for success, but there’s another, more frightening reason than impatience or fear of failure. If you reduce a screenplay to a grid, you seem to be eliminating room for error (e.g. “State the theme on page 5”). But at any one point on the grid, a writer still has many options (“Should the protagonist be a man or a woman?” “Old or young?” “Live or die at the end?” etc.) There are probably at least as many options in writing a script as there are moves in a game of checkers, and according to my brief research, checkers has 500 billion billion possible board positions. If your goal is to write “THE correct script,” you’ll go crazier than John Nash trying to figure out how to do so.
But there’s a flip side to the “no magic formula” approach. When you abandon hope of finding the one right path and focus on your organic, unpredictable relationship to story, you become the magician. You’ll make mistakes (ideally not while sawing an audience member in half), but as the magician you correct yourself and move on to the next option / challenge / opportunity. You’re not guaranteed that any one script will work out, but as a writer you get better each time.
“All these mistakes, we must surely be learning.” — George Harrison
