The Every

by Dave Eggers

Bailey studied some storytelling texts, screenplay guides, Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, and started reading about the patterns, the formulas, and once he saw that word, formula, it all clicked. A formula is essentially an algorithm.” “Exactly,” Delaney said. “Let’s start with screenwriting, which has been guided by formulas since the beginning. We did quite a bit of analysis here, and found that every successful screenplay ever written conforms rigidly to one of a few formulas, and the screenwriters we’ve brought in assure us that there is ready agreement in their ranks that formula, far from being a constraint, is the key to their freedom. Knowing the rules allows them to be creative within those guardrails. For example, 82 percent of the best scripts have the Catalyzing Moment on page 11. You can call storytelling a mystical, unknowable art, but there’s hard science here, and to deny it would be silly. Data is just—” “Comfort,” Delaney said.