Story – Robert McKee's Creative Storytelling Magazine Issue 005 – Drew Carey | Page 24

YOUR OWN
WORST
ENEMY
at the book for their publishing
houses, so they were happy to
give me quick notes and/or tell
me what worked and didn’t work
from their point of view. This is
what happens at agent/editor
lunches sometimes and it’s the
only reason I still occasionally
have them.

her closet than I thought possible. While scenes were changed,
the very problems that made it
unworkable a year and a quarter
before riddled the narrative. And
an obligatory scene—the hero at
the mercy of the villain scene,
crucial to nail in a thriller—was
gone entirely.

I was now finished with my job as
the “creation editor/agent” and
now it was time for my business
partner to do hers. We shook
hands and she walked away with
the road map to complete the
novel.

I took a deep breath and went
through her draft scene by scene
again and confronted her about
the lack of the crucial obligatory
scene.

Keep in mind that it took us a
good nine months to get to this
point. We debated scene after scene until we both felt it
was the best solution we could
come up with at the time. Were
they turning correctly? Were we
mixing up the positive and negative resolutions enough? Did
we progressively complicate the
Sto