Story – Robert McKee's Creative Storytelling Magazine Issue 005 – Drew Carey | Page 45

CHARACTER
CREATION

Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas,
debated mystical theories.
Nonetheless, it is true that when
medieval minds wanted to discuss
nonphysical realms, they would often use angels, demons, and other imaginaries to dramatize their
ideas. For example, when medieval
scholastics turned their thoughts
toward what today we would call
psychology, they sensed—as all
fine minds have always sensed—
the shallowness of life. Shallow in
the sense that most of us live off
the surface of our being. We rarely
explore, let alone exhaust, our full
capacities, our innate capacities.
Not because we lack the wish to
experience life in its extremes, but
because human nature is by nature conservative.
The first law of life is the conservation of life. Never spend unnecessary energy, never take unnecessary risks. We are genetically
compelled to act in the least and
safest way. Consequently, human
beings never burn energy unless
they have to, never take risks unless they have to. They only do
what they must. Of course, what
constitutes “have to” and “must” is
as idiosyncratic as there are people on this earth and as subjective
as the six billion different dreams
they dream every night. Nonetheless, because human nature is a
child of Mother Nature, we conserve life and skim the surface of
our being. We make sure that lit-

tle ever happens in life that would
force us to plumb our depths, to
live to our limits.
Realizing this truth, medieval scholars imagined a creature they called
the mind worm. Then they propose this hypothetical: Suppose
there was an all-powerful magical worm who could burrow into
the mind of a human being and
come to know everything in the
man—his social persona, his personal persona, his secret self, even
his secret unknown self, along with
the totality of his life experiences.
The worm would know everything
down to the smallest detail of everything he ever said, or thought,
or dreamed—everything ever done
to him or done by him.
Once the mind worm understood
the man in totality, it would then
know precisely what the man
lacked in his humanity and, therefore, what he needed for fulfillment. What’s more, suppose the
mind worm had the power to
make things happen in the world.
The worm could then create the
unique event that would set the
man on a path of experiences that
would cause him to explore himself
to the very depth of his humanity,
to experience everything he could
possibly experience, to live to the
limits of his powers, to face the limits of his weaknesses, to change—if
he can possibly change—and finally exhaust his capacity for life before he dies.

Story Magazine // Issue 005

As I read that, I thought, “The mind
worm is a writer.” This is what a
writer does. The writer first burrows into the mind of his character,
comes to understand him completely, and then asks, “What would
have to happen to this character to
cause him to live a one-of-a-kind
life that exhausts his birth-given
potential?” What story could I give
him that would force him to experience his humanity in absolute
depth, breadth, and in directions
that ordinary life would otherwise
deny him? How can I throw him
into a unique life that would ultimately and completely empty him
out?
The writer finds the answer to
these questions in the story’s inciting incident. To say it again in
different words, the inciting incident is the event that upsets the
balance of the character’s life and
propels him into a story-long action that will force him to use and
to use up his complete self so that
by the end of the story, the reader audience comes to understand
this character utterly. Nothing in
him is left unused, unexperienced,
unexpressed.
This is the ultimate ac