I am making my way through the Carter-touted Story Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee and have met some challenging ideas. I’d thought I’d run one up the flagpole.

Early in the book, McKee discusses his take on the decline of the storytelling craft. He faults what I’ll call the assembly line manufacture of stories. But he concludes this section like this:

The final cause for the decline of story runs very deep. Values, the positive/negative charges of life, are at the soul of our art. The writer shapes story around a perception of what’s worth living for, what’s worth dying for, what’s foolish to pursue, the meaning of justice, truth–the essential values. In decades past, writer and society more or less agreed on these questions, but more and more ours has become an age of moral and ethical cynicism, relativism, and subjectivism–a great confusion of values….

This erosion of values has brought with it a corresponding erosion of story. Unlike writers in the past, we can assume nothing. First we must dig deeply into life to uncover new insights, new refinements of value and meaning, then create a story vehicle that expresses our interpretation to an increasingly agnostic world. (17)

There is much to digest here. I’ve read the passage a billion times, trying to process it, to decide whether or not I stand with him. I think he is equating values with truth, and truth with morality and ethics. So when he mentions  the “erosion of values,” he could just as easily have written “erosion of morals.” Maybe that’s a leap since he speaks of “what’s foolish to pursue” as a value. Still, he seems to set up “moral and ethical cynicism, relativism, and subjectivism” as the opposite of value, so I’m sticking to my interpretation of value as, at least in part, morality. This fits nicely with my Mormon worldview, so I accepted his position.

In fact, the idea that people with morals, or moral people, are best suited to craft stories that attain a level of greatness excited me. I thought, Hallelujah! What good news for Mormon writers!

But then reality hit: The most devout, or morality-based, of Mormon stories tend to be far from the mark of great literature, a term I admit limps. Oh, I know that some Mormon lit is deep and meaningful, but much is not, particularly if it can wear the label “faith-promoting.” And don’t we think of faith-promoting stories and their writers as being especially morally steeped? I can’t speak for anyone except myself, but to me, these kinds of Deseret Bookish tales are superficial because they will surely reach a moral conclusion that is not only predictable,  but is “authorized.” I know from the outset what the moral boundaries of such a story will be.

Interestingly, McKee doesn’t mention anything about boundaries in his discussion of values, morals, or ethics. In fact, he says writers must “dig deeper,” which, to my mind, suggests moving beyond established boundaries. Yet to most Mormons, morality is defined by its boundaries.

Somewhere along the line, it dawned on me that I was interchanging the concept of morality with the idea of religious. Suddenly I lost confidence that religious writers are, by default, moral writers. Certainly our faith-promoting stories are bursting with Standards, spelled with a capital S, but are these Standards the same as values, ethics, and morals?

I’m left asking why today’s best literature is not being created by religious people. Shouldn’t the very cultures that most vociferously defend choosing the right, or doing what Jesus would, be the best at developing ideas that explore moral and ethical controversies?

Of course I acknowledge that many of the greatest writers of the 20th century had strong religious ties. But that is McKee’s point. Great stories used to be written by moral people, but, he argues, the morality and values behind these stories is no longer lauded on a large scale. This brings me back to the question: Have religious people–including Mormons–stopped (or never been) the McKee kind of moral?

One of my dearest LDS friends has cautioned me not to read the kinds of things I read, worrying that the books and journals she questions might challenge my testimony. She, like many others, only ingests reading material she feels is church-approved, or definitively ‘right,” and therefore safe. To her, if anything Joseph Smith taught or did proved  to be not “true,” then her entire religion–her life–falls into the chum bucket. Her primary investment is not discovering truth, but sustaining truth as she already has it.

Can that be a moral way to live?

Can a person with such a strong, overarching need to protect his/her core identity “dig deeply into life to uncover new insights, new refinements of value and meaning”? Can he/she “then create a story vehicle that expresse[s his/her] interpretation to an increasingly agnostic world”?

Here my brain spins, so I ask your opinion. Can a person’s faith conviction prevent him/her from becoming deeply, truly moral? If so, is this lack of morality preventing our writers from crafting masterpieces? I tend to think so.

Jeanette Atwood

This is an edited version of a previous post. It will be appearing on page 3 of the Sunstone arriving in your mailbox very soon. I just wanted to show you what a good bout of editing and an illustrator can do for a piece. Note, for example, the streamlining of the prose and the unification of the controlling metaphor (as contrasted with the earlier version). And, by the way, one of the perks of publishing in Sunstone is that you get an illustration or two specifically created for your piece.

Do you believe in Santa Claus? The Easter Bunny? The Tooth Fairy? How about the Author Bunny?

I believed in the Author Bunny for many years. Amazing novels and short stories conceived themselves inside her like eggs, perfect and smooth. Then she would find a worthy worshipper upon whom to bestow those stories (usually after midnight).

Oh, sure, the writer had to work to peel those stories and expose their beauty, but the story was already in there. All the writer had to do was find the words to embody it.

How many days did I sit at my computer certain that the Author Bunny had left a little gift for me? How many drafts did I pump out? How many perfect stories did I present to how many critics who said, “Umm, yeah. Fine.”

Fine? Obviously you don’t grasp what I’m doing here. Don’t you see the nuances? Can’t you catch the symbolism? Isn’t the story’s soul blindingly apparent?

I spent many years trying to attract the Author Bunny. But it finally became depressingly evident that I had been tried and found unworthy.

No stories for you, you naughty boy.

But I’m a stubborn cuss. I wanted to be a writer anyway, so I enrolled in a creative writing MFA program where I learned something that made it possible for me to be a writer without the Author Bunny (sounds heretical, I know). That something is a single principle. I’m giving it to you free of charge—just because you’re you.

Just as there is a craft to engine design, architecture, and artificial sweetener formulation, there is a craft to storytelling.

I spent five years studying story craft, my main text being Robert McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. Focusing on a screenwriting book when one wants to learn story craft may seem odd, but, as I have found, screenplays are story skeletons. They’re the bones that the cast and crew hang flesh upon. You don’t have to cut through flowery language, extended metaphors, or languorous passages of description. Rather, the beams and bones of the story lie exposed before you. And there are ways to know if they can stand, or if the art direction, costumes, actors, soundtrack, and cinematography are simply makeup and an evening gown applied to a corpse.

Though I was obsessed with understanding the components of story, it took a while to learn and apply them. Looking back on my MFA thesis, I cringe. Why in the world did they let me graduate?

Eventually, my work started to pay off. I could tell because the first time I submitted a screenplay to a film festival, they took my twenty-dollar entrance fee and never spoke to me again. The next time around, I revised that screenplay and won third place. I could identify the screenplay’s problems and repair them. It was like fixing a toaster.

After that, I won writing contests and was published regularly. But it wasn’t because the Author Bunny had put me on his “nice” list, it was because I learned how stories work, just like an architect learns how buildings work, or an engine designer learns how engines work.

Learning the craft of storytelling has been great for my career. I can actually make a living with words, which is something I’ve always wanted to do.

Reflecting on the Mormon fiction I have read, much of it has one thing in common. A lack of story craft. Yes, many of those stories may have lovely language,  sympathetic characters, and interesting ideas, but they don’t go anywhere.

I’ve written a lot of critiques to fiction writers focusing on their story’s structure, and with almost no exception I receive this response, “What in the world are you talking about? This is how the story goes!”

That, gentle reader, is the voice of one who is in the thrall of the Author Bunny. It’s the voice of someone who believes that stories conceive themselves ex nihilo.

As Robert McKee writes,

The novice plunges ahead, counting solely on experience, thinking that that life he’s lived and the films he’s seen give him something to say and the way to say it [. . .] 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 built 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 clichés of either the commercial or the art house variety.1

Lack of story craft is the bane of Mormon fiction. In fact, I believe it is the main barrier that keeps Mormon writing from gaining the strength to compete in the national and international markets. Too many potential Mormon writers still believe in the Author Bunny. They put no work into story craft, convinced that it will be delivered to them by a furry anthropomorph. They spend their lives waiting for an egg that never arrives.

NOTES

1. Robert McKee, Story, Substance, Structure, Style and the Craft of Screenwriting. (New York: Regan Books, 1996) 15-16.