Nows and Forevers

Long before Brian Cox played the patriarchal media mogul in “Succession,” he was another unforgettable real-life character: Screenwriting and story telling guru Robert McKee in “Adaptation.”

I like “Adaptation” as a parable about creation and the writing life, and as a living reminder of McKee’s classic “Story.” I’ve learned a lot from that book over the years, even though I’ve never been to the story seminar that is a setting in the movie.

Here, Cox riffs on McKee in a few scenes. He’s only a minor but unforgettable character, saying the things that the real McKee would say.

A lot of it isn’t new to me, or anyone who writes for a living. I’ve been a student of writing, dramatic structure and narrative for almost as long as I’ve been able to write. I’ve built my career on narrative, whether in my own work or as an editor when I was in my 20s and 30s. I’ve been told I was a pretty good editor with flashes of brilliance, even though with just one exception (a very important one), I’ve always seen myself as more of a writer than editor.

Cox’s McKee — and McKee himself — tells Nicholas Cage/Charlie Kauffman that a character needs to want something for the story to work.

“You can’t have a protagonist without desire,” he says. “It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any f-ing sense.”

I think back to something that had profound impact on me as a kid, Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 rules of creating writing, which I had seen in one of my grandfather’s magazines when I was 11 or 12 and pulled it out discretely. I had that page for decades.

Vonnegut wrote:

Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

Kurt Vonnegut

This short clip, and another scene with Cox, impart other dollops of wisdom: no voiceovers (and in the middle of a voiceover), don’t waste a reader/viewer’s time (what many an editor has told a writer), and no deus ex machina.

That last one I remember as a lesson from my beloved 8th grade English teacher, Mrs. Kathy Clark, at Coronado Middle School in Coronado, California, back in the early ’80s. No deus ex machina in your stories! I think about that every Marvel movie my kids drag me to.

And then, one of my favorite pieces of advice: The main character has to change by the end of the story/movie.

Yeah, I like that.