Last night, I thought I was in church.

I began reading chapter one of Robert McKee’s STORY, and every five seconds, I was AMENing and nodding and shouting YES like he was the pastor of words.

In the pages I read, McKee discussed the decline of story and the loss of craft.

These are just some of the awesome tidbits:

The Decline of Story

…critic Kenneth Burke tells us, stories are equipment for living.

:::

…all fine films, novels, and plays, through all shades of the comic and tragic, entertain when they give the audience a fresh model of life empowered with an affective meaning.  To retreat behind the notion that the audience simply wants to dump its troubles at the door and escape reality is a cowardly abandonment of the artist’s responsibility.  Story isn’t a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality, our best effort to make sense out of the anarchy of existence.

:::

A culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling.  When society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates.  We need true satires and tragedies, dramas and comedies that shine a clean light into the dingy corners of the human psyche and society.  If not, as Yeats warned, “…the centre can not hold.”

The Loss of Craft

The novice [writer] plunges ahead, counting solely on experience, thinking that the life he’s lived and the films he’s seen [or books he's read] give him something to say and the way to say it.  Experience, however, is overrated.  Of course we want writers who don’t hide from life, who live deeply, observe closely.  This is vital but never enough.  For most writers, the knowledge they gain from reading and study equals or outweighs experience, especially if that experience goes unexamined.  Self-knowledge is the key – life plus deep reflection on our reactions to life.

:::

As for technique, what the novice mistakes for craft is simply his unconscious absorption of story elements from every novel, film, or play he’s ever encountered.  As he writes, he matches his work by trial and error against a model build up from accumulated reading and watching.  The unschooled writer calls this “instinct,” but it’s merely habit and it’s rigidly limiting.  He either imitates his mental prototype or imagines himself in the avant-garde and rebels against it.  But the haphazard groping toward or revolt against the sum of unconsciously ingrained repetitions is not, in any sense, technique, and leads to screenplays clogged with cliches of either the commercial or the art house variety.

Got two things to say:  A…and MEN.

If you’d like to pick ANY of these quotes to discuss, definitely jump in and do so…would love to talk writing with you guys!

Oh, and BTW, I wrote 13 pages today on my script, Saying No to the Big O.  Up to 34 pages now.  Excited.

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It was pretty appropriate that I received my copy of Robert McKee’s well-known book STORY in the mail yesterday.

For the first three days of Script Frenzy, I had been really sick.  I think it was the devil trying to mess with my spirit and get me off my game.  He succeeded, for a few days, and then came McKee.

Last night, before falling to sleep, I cracked open STORY and read the introduction.  It almost felt like talking to a lost friend.  It made me miss the days of my MFA program when my classmates and I would sit, drink, and for hours on end wax literarily about writing.

Afterward, we would all be so amped, we would rush home, turn off phones and TVs, and write until a slip of light leaked through blinds, alerting us to morning.

Many of the points McKee makes in his introduction weren’t new to me, but they were food for my literary stomach and filled me completely.

Story is about principles, not rules.

Story is about eternal, universal forms, not formulas.

Story is about archetypes, not stereotypes.

Story is about thoroughness, not shortcuts.

Story is about the realities, not the mysteries of writing.

Story is about mastering the art, not second-guessing the marketplace.

Story is about respect, not disdain, for the audience.

Story is about originality, not duplication.

Want to know what these mean?  Get the book [here].  If you’re a writer, any style of writer, you owe your writing spirit this book.

As I read McKee’s thoughts on these points, my own thoughts were reaffirmed, solidified.  Things I have been thinking for years but allowed the market or others to sway my thoughts had been made firm again.

I went to bed with McKee’s words swirling about my head and my latest screenplay idea beating in my heart.

I was excited for the fourth day of Script Frenzy, for I would start a new screenplay – negative thoughts be damned.

The goal of Script Frenzy is to write a 100-page screenplay in 30 days.  Sounds easy, right?  I mean what’s 3, 4 pages a day.  No one says they have to be good, LOL

It’s not so easy when you have life and sickness and obligations coming from every direction and your writing begins to seem…so…hobbyish as opposed to being an integral part of what makes you, you.

So, today, I vowed to do coffee first and writing second.  NOTHING else would get done if I didn’t get pages written on the script.

I read through my outline I wrote a week ago and I charted what parts I wanted to get done by what dates to insure a script was done by the end of the month.

I sat and thought about my characters and the storyline.

I remembered McKee’s words.

And I wrote.

And I’m pleased.

Today, I wrote 21 pages. I’m 1/5 of the way through the 100 pages though in the end, I’m worried more about having a story written than having exactly 100 pages written.

Writing is on the agenda tomorrow.

McKee is on the agenda as bedtime reading.

Maybe he’ll inspire me again.

We shall see.

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