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.

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…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.

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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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Tags: Robert McKee, Script Frenzy, Shon Bacon, Story, Writing

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