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.