Yesterday from 9 AM to 8:30 PM, I sat in a weird conference room in the Hotel Pennsylvania with a few hundred other writers and show biz types to listen to screenwriting guru Robert McKee lecture about what makes a well-told screenplay. Not that I necessarily want to write screenplays, but who knows. All the principals can pretty much be applied to the novel as well, although in the novel we get to see into the heads of characters, which changes things, and also I think POV is a much more important issue in novel writing. McKee's book "Story" was loaned to me by the agent who is packaging the two pseudonymous porn novels I've been hired to write. I never gave it back but sent the guy a replacement copy via Amazon, because it was proving so helpful with the revision of my second children's novel.
"Story" is really the only book I've ever read about writing that was useful, and I'm not counting cheerleader-type books like "Bird by Bird" and "One Continuous Mistake" which are also very helpful in terms of repeating to you the one thing you can't ever hear enough of as a writer, which is "Keep going! You can do it!"
The only drawback of McKee's method is a tendency toward formula or dogma, and I was sort of expecting him to come off as a bit narcissistic in person, but this was the biggest and most pleasant surprise of the day. He is in fact a great champion of the artist. He's foulmouthed, funny, and lefty yet un-PC. He went on an amusing, Rex Stout-ish rampage against the words "network" and "utilize" and a less amusing rampage against the expression "physically challenged." I am a firm believer in calling people what they want to be called, but I share his rage against euphemism.
Basically, this dude is tremendously personally reassuring, in the way seeing anyone who is farther along on the artistic path is always reassuring. There's this thing in the Anne Rice vampire novels where the older a vampire gets, the more powerful they get and the more their body resembles stone. In one scene, a young vampire reaches out and softly touches the back of an older vampire's hand, just to feel the solidity of it. I understand now why everyone takes McKee's seminar, many people multiple times. It isn't an intellectual experience, as reading the book was. It's more like darshan.
Some great insights, and I paraphrase:
"Talent is the ability to see connections between things that only you can see. Literary talent is the ability to manipulate language into something higher and more perfect. Storytelling talent is the ability to manipulate life into something higher and more perfect."
"There are many truths -- left-wing, right-wing -- but we know when we are in the presence of truth. We know how to tell truth apart from bullshit. The biggest truths are the bitter ones."
"Cliche comes from not knowing your material well enough. So does writer's block. You never know your material well enough without research, even if your work is autobiographical. Do enough research and the work will almost write itself."
"You'd better know the conventions of your genre, because your audience will."
"Most protagonists do not change; they are simply revealed. The pressure of life strips away surface layers of characterization to reveal who they really are."
I was seated between two adorable boys in their early twenties. The one on my right worked for Nova on PBS, and the one on my left was a bartender and aspiring writer/director/actor. The w/d/a and I turned out to live about three houses away from each other.
On the lunch break I received a rejection on my second children's novel, which I consider the best thing I've ever done and which nobody seems to get. The publisher had had the ms for a really long time, and it's always hard to have to wait so long just to hear no. After getting this email, I was very tempted to go to the bar across the street and just begin doing tequila shots, but I made myself go back in the room.
Then McKee started talking about protagonists of the classic narrative and the way they need to have tremendous power of will in pursuit of their goals. (This was another part where I had to remind myself of what a different form the novel is, lending itself much more easily to the transparent/passive protagonist -- the Anthony Powell novels, which I have just hit the sweet spot on in the magnificent eighth book The Soldier's Art, feature a protagonist who is almost will-less, nothing more than a nexus of connection.)
McKee then stopped talking about protagonists and said, "It takes ten years to even start to be a success at writing, and in that ten years you will probably write ten failed projects, and if you are going to get upset about that and expect everything to sell then get the f out of the room because you're an f-ing diletante." Then he said that if we as writers are so dogged in pursuit of our goals, how could we make out main characters any less so, and if our main characters are so full of will power, how could we be any less so, and this sort of made me want to cry, because the main character of my second novel is such a beautiful kid and all he wants to do is play his viola, and he is based of course on my wonderful husband, who had a martini waiting for me when I got home. The artists I admire most, people like Ethan and Donald Westlake, are people who just put down their heads and keep working, taking the praise and blame with a grain of salt. And anyway, if I fail as a children's author, there is always porn to fall back on.