If there’s one word that will cause the average underpublished writer to wither as though salted, it’s formulaic. The idea of adding artificial structure to their work when they didn’t intend to use any is inconceivable.

A tiny percentage of the writers will be right for many reasons. Either the story is perfect as it is, unstructured as it is. It may be written for a non-colonial readership. A work may even defy any ability to identify what it is or how it pulled off. But proper facilitation is always required in any group setting. It is the facilitator’s job to turn any attempt to force structure into a work that doesn’t need it into a learning opportunity.

The argument that the workshop can’t help work not meant for the filthy commercial genres creates the assumption, however, that non-colonial stories can’t be improved on by meaningful instruction. It certainly implies that there is no room in filthy commercial work for stories that don’t use colonial storytelling structure to engage the reader.

Any story can be made more significant with a meaningful attempt to do so.

The problem is again, though, that everyone on the mountain is listening. “Some work doesn’t require foundational structures to improve it” is too often heard as “my YA Dystopian Novel doesn’t require foundational structures to work.”

Foundational structures are not formulaic. They’re the recipe ingredients. How a writer uses conflict and tension, meaningful character change or the lack thereof to create fiction their ideal reader wants to read has no limitations.

Learning to cook is hard. It’s time management, kitchen safety, ingredient handling and knowing how to apply heat and cold to things in the right order so that they taste good and are both nice to chew and least likely to kill us. A novice chef will struggle with a souffle/tension years after they already have the basic knowledge to serve up a nice meal regularly.

Using tension is hard enough. Trying to use tension without using conflict to drive it requires molecular gastronomy levels of difficulty and accuracy that takes practice to get it right even with very clear directions. Trying to use tension without conflict without understanding how to manipulate either is like trying to create a stable, room-temperature foam while blindfolded and handcuffed.