Part 3: Using McKee

Robert McKee's Story was recommended to me somehow as a book that could actually teach you how to write. I'm not trained as a writer and I had no confidence in my writing ability. I'm one who has plenty of ideas for characters or events or settings but who hadn't yet really strung those things into a cohesive story, at least a full comic book length story. And McKee did help. He gives systems and tools by which you can sort of artificially pump drama into an empty collection of details.

He gives you these diagrams that illustrate what he says, like this one that reminds the writer that you have to make sure that there's a gap between what the protagonists expects to happen as a result of his actions and what actually happens. If the main character got what he wanted out of an action, where's the drama? So you just torture your character, basically.

One way he teaches us to torture our characters is to first determine what he or she wants, what's positive, then give him or her first what's contrary to that, then what's contradictory to that, and finally, your story's not over till you take them all the way to the negation of the negation, which sounds like a double negative but what he means is to take them to the lowest of the low, the worst it can get. Then, the ending can be that the character gets he wants, fails in getting it, or that he doesn't get what he thought he wanted but instead gets what he wanted subconsciously, his unconscious desire, so it becomes a sort of bittersweet ending.

These rules sound very restrictive but it was something I needed at the time. It got me through it.