recipe

We spoke in class about the recipe of stories. Prof. Jenkins used the word "manufactured" to emphasize this skeletal structure to narratives. He challenged us to come up with more than 10 different plot lines, telling us before hand that there are only ten. It was difficult to believe. How could it be that in all of the stories written and spoken around the world, throughout the course of human history could, lays one of ten event lines that the protagonist could take?
When I hear “manufactured” I think of an assembly line. When I think about stories being manufactured, it makes me think of people lazily repainting the covers of old stories and calling them new. It has a sort of negative feel to it, but I don’t think it was intended. Manufactured, also makes me think of human ingenuity and our ability to tinker. I once heard someone drunkenly murmur “creation is just distorted memory”, and applying “manufactured” to this saying gives me a much more positive feeling.
It gives these plots, these timeless structures, a reincarnate property that I’m sure have some psychological ties to our psyche.