How Not to Think About Storytelling: A Lesson from Robert McKee

Storytelling is about picturing the meaning given in human life, not making meaning up from scratch.

Here’s a contrarian notion. Artistic vision is not a mere matter of personal expression.

The idea that art is personal expression is an idea we owe principally to the Romantics. M.H. Abrams, one of the great scholars of the Romantic period, articulates the Romantic understanding of poetry as “the impulse within the poet of feelings and desires seeking expression, or the compulsion of the ‘creative’ imagination, which, like God the creator, has an internal source of motion.” On the Romantic view, poetry—all art—is a godlike creation from an internal source of authenticity within the artist.

Which has led us to the point today, where the only meaning in art is that which is bestowed upon it by the artist’s expressive authenticity.     

The other day on Instagram I stumbled upon a clip of screenwriting teacher Robert McKee being interviewed by Rich Roll. I have been for many years a big fan of McKee’s approach to storytelling, and especially screenwriting. I tell my students interested in filmmaking, or indeed any kind of imaginative writing, that McKee’s Story is the best book I know on the craft of storytelling. Moreover, in my philosophical work-in-progress, The Way of Beauty: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts (due April 2024 from Word on Fire Academic), I make use of McKee’s understanding of story as “dramatized dialectical debate” as I work through how stories picture our pursuit of human flourishing.

Here’s what McKee had to say in the clip:

“There is no intrinsic meaning to life. That’s not the same thing as saying life is meaningless. You, as the existentialists used to teach, you have to find your project; you have to find out what gets you up in the morning; you have to give your life meaning, and you have to do it yourself. If you wait for other people to do it, you will live an invalid life; it won’t be your life; you will be leading other people’s life. So, what is my meaning? Why do I do this? Human beings suffer. That is what it means to be alive: to suffer. Anything a person can do to alleviate that suffering in others is a good thing, a positive thing, a meaningful thing. Stories do exactly that. They make life livable.”

So, for McKee, human existence is drained of meaning—except for the meaning that we put into it with our “projects,” which express our authenticity, our “true” selves.

Gone is any source of value in the world that we don’t make through an act of choice.

But, as we should have learned in Philosophy 101, the claim that there is no intrinsic meaning to life is unsustainable.

Are the lives of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust void of meaning except for those who choose to make the Jews their “project”?  

Are a mother’s sacrifices for her children void of meaning except for those who choose to make this mother, or motherhood in general, their “project”?

Is the beauty of Notre Dame cathedral void of meaning except for those who choose to make Gothic architecture their “project”?  

I cannot imagine McKee replying in the affirmative to any of these questions.

Still, McKee—and many others—want desperately to hold on to the view that nothing can trump the expression of their personal authenticity. They don’t want to be bound to anything outside themselves. They want a certain kind of freedom.

But that kind of freedom, as we should have learned from an existentialist like Sartre, is both a distortion and an illusion.

What’s more, it has a devastating effect on popular storytelling, and through popular storytelling, the culture.    

For what can stories become if their only source—I emphasize, only source—is what the artist feels most passionately about?

Inevitably, stories became reflections of the untutored emotional state of the artist.

Untutored, that is, by the beautiful things of reality that the artist has not made.

The beautiful things that call the artist out of him- or herself, and give a meaningful shape to his or her feelings, making those feelings something worthy of expression—not to mention, interesting.

Storytelling is about picturing the meaning given in human life, not making meaning up from scratch.

True enough, storytelling does have something to do with expression. And yes, storytelling does have something to do with personal authenticity.

But storytelling cannot, at the risk of becoming itself meaningless, be the only source of meaning in the world.

---

My recently released novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair, is available here on Amazon and from Chrism Press.