Story – Robert McKee's Creative Storytelling Magazine Issue 005 – Drew Carey | Page 57

MCKEE
INTERVIEWS
STEVEN PRESSFIELD
RM: So, you make a virtue out of
what is inevitable anyway, and
see it as a condition of life that
we have to?
SP: When we were cavemen, we still
had to hunt, which was kind of the
same thing, right? A band would go
out facing predators and horrible
freezing conditions.
RM: It’s worse than that. Remember that body they found in the
Swiss mountainside. It’s 5000
years old, and somebody shot
him with an arrow.
SP: Right.
RM: There was a lot from hunting animals, I’m sure.
SP: Conflict is a part of life, right? Like
we just said, the coyote is coming
up the driveway. It has teeth, fangs
and it is out there to kill. The hawks
that are cruising around here, that’s
just their nature. God made it this
way.
RM: Yes, and that is the way we all
understand it. How do you gather
the vocabulary, especially when
you’re writing period material?
The names of things? Verbs and
actions are pretty universal, but
there might be terminologies for
doing things that are unique to
that period. How do you gather
the vocabulary? Do you have a
special file in your computer just
for names of things?

SP: Actually. I do. When I find the
words that are right for certain
things, or slang phrases, like I said, I
have a file on slang and acronyms.
I’m working on a story that’s set in
ancient Athens or ancient Sparta. So
the voice to create, to make it believable, is found by reading works
that are written by Oxford and Cambridge dons. The translations of Xenophon or Thucydides came from
the early 20th century or the 19th
century. So they’re very formal and
that’s kind of the way Shakespeare
and Julius Caesar spoke. These ancient characters speak in a flowery
language, and so I try to create a
hybrid of that and modern slang or
whatever.
RM: You do. You introduce the
modernism.
SP: To try to make it seem real.
RM: As if it was their slang, as if it
was their language.
SP: Yeah. To me, that’s my version of
it. I’ve read translations of the Iliad,
where they bring it so modern that
it loses a lot of the reality for me.
RM: The Bible, too, has been
translated out of all, you know…

SP: For Killing Rommel, which was
World War II, I read a bunch of real
memoirs from that time—in that era
and in that place, in that same campaign. I would copy or mentally try
to do my stuff just like they did it. I
would write down any phrase that
rang a bell. The more details you can
layer in, in vocabulary and everything else, the more real it sounds.
RM: Of course it does. As I have
stressed many times, an author
is somebody with knowledge,
and one of the things they know
is the names of things.
SP: Yes.
RM: Last subject. When you do
your outline and it gets worked
into the novel, how do you break
the structure of the telling down?
The basic structure is a chapter, but the chapter becomes a
book or a part, and then within
the chapter there are subchapters where you space in order to
break a scene. When you’re working, how do you know? Let’s just
start with the middle section, the
middle thing, the chapter. How
do you know when a chapter is
over? How do you know? Do you
end it on a clear turning point?
What punctuates it?

SP: Yeah, I hate it when they do that.
RM: Right. I’m a fallen Catholic,
and I hated it when the Mass went
from Latin to English. I think a lot
of people did.

Story Magazine // Issue 005

SP: That’s another great question.
For me it’s about the negative space,
it’s about what you cut. They say
that movies are just made of shots
and cuts. So it’s the space between