Story – Robert McKee's Creative Storytelling Magazine Issue 005 – Drew Carey | Page 23

YOUR OWN
WORST
ENEMY
A few years ago, a very talented
line-by-line writer came to me
for help.
A publisher I respected had recommended her to me. The publisher believed (rightfully) that
the woman had what it took to
write bestselling thrillers. The
publisher had passed on a number of her books – not because he
didn’t find them compelling, but
because ultimately they “didn’t
work.”
The writer asked me to work
with her from first idea to final
draft. That is, she wanted to start
from scratch – seek my opinion
about the right kind of character
to feature, the particular genre
of thriller that I felt was the most
underserved and to basically engineer a new novel from start to
finish using The Story Grid. She
could not afford to pay my usual
editorial fee, but I too believed in
her, so we came to a profit-sharing relationship.
We would be business partners,
just like a couple of scientists figuring out how to create a new
kind of light bulb. I’d done this
sort of thing before with narrative nonfiction as well as fiction
and while the work requires a
multiple year commitment, I’ve
never regretted taking it on. I always learn something new.
We got to work.

I walked her through The Story
Grid, how I work, etc. and she
was over the moon. It turned out
that she was as much of a story
nerd as I was. She had read and
studied many of the same Story
experts I had, so we spoke the
same language. She immediately understood my principles and
jumped right in to the process.
We began by both agreeing that
she’d write a contemporary thriller that would introduce a brand
new series character, a woman
with a Jason Bourne-like ignorance of her past. While the external genre was “spy thriller,” the
internal genre of the book would
be a “disillusionment plot.” (More
on this later) Coincidentally, she
told me that she had a draft of a
book she’d written with a similar
character in her closet.
She suggested that we begin with
that draft to see if there was anything salvageable from it.
This is when I started to get nervous. But I relented. Maybe the
manuscript could give us some
direction – never say never, right?
Why reinvent something that has
already worked?
I read her abandoned book and it
had some really great moments.
Innovative turns of phrase, some
seriously frightening scenes.
Overall, it gave me even more
confidence in her abilities. But

Story Magazine // Issue 005

it most certainly did not work. It
never paid off the promise of the
hook in an inevitable, yet surprising way. She did not disagree.
I ran it through The Story Grid and
then we sat down to go through
the places where it went off the
rails. Weeks later, I thought we
had a very clear understanding
that the new lead character for
our reverse engineering project
would not be based on the character from her previous unsold
novel.
Rather, we’d use a few of the
scenes from the novel that really worked and perhaps adapt
them to suit as major turning
points for the new novel. I left her
with a working map of about 60
scenes/chapters that included all
of the conventions and obligatory scenes of the spy thriller form
(more on this later on). I thought
the conventions and obligatory
scenes that we’d sketched out
were uniquely twisted and innovative to a degree that would
delight a thriller fan.
I even cold pitched the story, like
Hollywood screenwriters do, to
a few friends who held very high
editorial positions at Big Five
publishing houses. These friends
had purchased millions of dollars
worth of stories from me before,
so I knew they had zero interest
in humoring me. They wanted
me to give them the first crack