You know how it is. You start reading a new novel and slowly you begin to see the outlines of the plot emerging. And after fifty pages or so, the pieces start falling into place. Okay, it’s another poor-bluestocking-goes-to-London plot—which variation will this be? Will she become a companion for her beautiful cousin? Will she help her beautiful sister find a rich husband to save the family? Will she track down her rich uncle and beg him for money for her almost-starving siblings? How exactly will she Save The Day, once she manages to catch the interest of the cynical, decadent, and filthy rich hero, who will marry her in the end (after, of course, deflowering her midway through the book)?

It’s a formula, one you may have seen several times. And once you recognize the pieces, you can settle back and watch how well the author uses them. What will she do to make this one different? How will her characters measure up to those in similar books? How will this particular version of the formula take those pieces and make them fresh and intriguing? Or not.

Formulas are another thing that many critics hate about popular fiction. It’s “formulaic,” they sneer. This is undoubtedly true. I’m just not sure it constitutes a problem. Formulas have their place, and done well, they can produce the pleasure of the familiar mixed in with a pinch of the adventuresome.

Romance, for example, has almost as many stock characters as restoration comedy and there are only so many ways those characters can interact. Formulas represent a way of setting up the chess board, as it were. If a contemporary romance features an ambitious young heroine, trying to claw her way up the professional ladder, who needs to Get A Life, you know she’ll end up in some situation where her driving ambition won’t help her and where she’ll learn how to cope with an unexpected complication. She’ll have to deal with a dilapidated bed and breakfast bequeathed by her Great Aunt Maude, say, or a directive from her boss to close down a newly acquired subsidiary business that happens to be the mainstay of that quirky small town in the wilds of Wyoming. If it’s a formula you enjoy, you’ll read on with pleasure. If it’s one you’re not excited by (and the ambitious young career woman brought low has never been a favorite of mine), you probably won’t get beyond the blurb.

The people who don’t like formulas are usually people who demand that fiction be constantly new. And who leap on anything—like, say, Pride and Prejudice Meets the Three Stooges—that fulfills that desire.

But there’s a long, long tradition of using plots and storylines that readers already know. Shakespeare’s plots were hardly unique. Dickens’ novels were full of detail and character sketches, but the stories themselves weren’t exactly unpredictable. And coming up with a story line that no one’s ever thought of before may be impossible anyway—it’s more typical for an author to take something that worked in one setting, like a folk tale motif, and transfer it to another setting, like a space ship orbiting Antares.

Personally, I’m more upset by formulas that are used badly than by the fact of the formulas themselves. I love to see someone like Loretta Chase play with audience expectations in Lord of Scoundrels, but I’m never in any doubt where the hero and heroine will end up. Elizabeth Lowell can teach me a lot about jewels in Midnight on Ruby Bayou, but I’m not upset that the plot runs on clearly identifiable rails. When the Nine Naughty Novelists did our send-up of vampire/werewolf paranormals, The Zillionaire Vampire Cowboy’s Secret Werewolf Babies, and our Regency parody, Love’s Savage Whiplash, we had a lot of fun playing with all the conventions of the genres. But you’ll notice we ended up in pretty much the same place we would have ended up even if the books had been played straight.

So here’s to formulas, y’all. Done well, they’re actually a lot of fun. It’s always enjoyable to have one part of your life that you can rely on to work out the way it should.