Story – Robert McKee's Creative Storytelling Magazine Issue 005 – Drew Carey | Page 54

MCKEE
INTERVIEWS
STEVEN PRESSFIELD
what a guy wrote back then.
RM: Yes, yes. That’s as old as Robinson Crusoe.
SP: I know, but that kind of works in
a way, I think.
RM: Do you know why? Do you
know why this device first began?
SP: No.
RM: What you do–you write novels–300 or more years ago, that
was thought to be photography.
That was thought to be the lowest of the low, because real writing was epic poetry or history.
It had to be factual. That somebody would write something as
if it were history, and then it’s fiction, was thought to be immoral.
SP: Really? I didn’t know that.
RM: So, how did the writer get
around with it? Defoe says at the
beginning of Robinson Crusoe, “I
found this manuscript washed
up on a beach.”
SP: Yeah.
RM: Well, here it is. I’m just giving it to you. All kinds of lies and
conceits opened novels in those
days to say, “Hey, this is history,”
and so that device continues.
SP: Yeah. It’s a very liberating device
from a writer’s point of view. It’s like,

“Here, I found this. It’s not mine, I
just found it.” Then, as a writer, you
can really get into it.

his mom and dad.

RM: Then the audience is happy
to go along with it. Wonderful.
Now, the person is one aspect
of a point of view. The other is
the physical point of view, where
you put that person, what he
sees, hears, and says and how he
moves through space. You’ve got
an outline, where something has
to happen. Then you imagine it
in its location, and then you’ve
got your character. How do you
work the physical point of view
in a scene?

SP: And nobody notices him. He’s
there and he sees everything, and
people will confide in him. So it was
no problem to negotiate him into
a scene. I think when you’re using a
first-person narrator, it is important
to find one that can seamlessly be
in every scene.

SP: I’m not sure. I just kind of do it.
I don’t know if this is answering it,
Bob, but as you have said in your
classes, a lot of times there will be
cops, or detectives will be protagonists, or lawyers, or they’ll be the
point of view because it’s the nature
of them to investigate. They have
permission to go into your house
and go through your stuff, and all
that kind of thing.

RM: If you could only see the
scene from the child’s point of
view, from the foot soldier’s point
of view, or from Alexander’s point
of view because of that limitation,
doesn’t that force you to figure
out strategies of physical point
of view that you wouldn’t have
had if you were omniscient and
could be anywhere you wanted?

So I think I will always, if I’m having a
narrator, which I always do, I will try
to make sure that he, as seamlessl