I would disagree with the idea that all our stories are formulaic, but they are certainly pretty safe. When we serve up our spaghetti we stick pretty close to what most people expect from the dish, and for someone who eats a lot of spaghetti (even really good spaghetti) after a while you yearn for something a little spicier even if you recognize that most people are still quite happy with spaghetti and that us serving up linguini probably wouldn't go over pretty well. I think, too, that the idea of "maybe if you served linguini people might find they like it as much as they do spaghetti" has been pretty much disproven by history, much as we would like to believe otherwise.