In this interview segment, Robert McKee explains his method for breaking through creative despair and writer's block. He advocates narrowing the infinite scope of writing to a single, manageable element—such as a specific aspect of dialogue—so that a writer can concentrate effort and make concrete progress. McKee stresses that the only true antidote to block is to keep writing: sit down, confront the bad page, identify the problem (often a clichéd character), remove the offending material, and start fresh on a clean sheet. He likens the process to a child’s disciplined routine, using the delete key as a tool to erase ugliness and replace it with expressive, beautiful prose. By repeatedly writing, even when the work feels terrible, talent emerges and the writer regains momentum.
Chapters
How do you use in your daily routine the principles? And second, how do you break the creative despair or writer's block when it happens in your world?
Well, this, as I said, the subject is so bottomless and, and limitless that all you do is, like the book I just finished on dialogue, you single out a certain quality of writing or a certain aspect of writing, and that shrinks it so you can focus on that. And then this book that I just did on dialogue is in 3 parts, but that— I'm sure that there's going to be Dialogue 2, Dialogue 3, Dialogue 4, Dialogue 5. I mean, just 3 aspects of the subject of dialogue, which is an aspect of the subject of the story, 3 aspects of dialogue does not complete it by any stretch. And so the material is always there, and it's just a matter of making choices as to what you're going to focus on. And then this business of despair or writer's block, And look, you get out of your despair the same way you got into it. You write. And you keep writing, and until your talent kicks in. And it's often— it's fascinating to me how often, how quickly that happens. If you sit there reading your bad writing and go, "Oh, it's terrible. Oh, I hate it. Oh, whatever," which is a good step, really, you know, to recognize that your writing's awful, and then you despair, well, that's just immature. That's just childish. But it happens to everybody, no matter who they are. And so, you know, you do what your parent would do, when you were a child, you disciplined yourself. And you get back into the chair, and you put a clean piece of paper in front of you, a blank screen, and you pick a topic. You know, you look at your bad writing, you say, what's wrong with this? And you go, well, it's that character. She is a cliché. And everything I've had her do and say is clichéd. And so you pull that character out of the cast, and you put a blank page up there, and you put it, you know, Rita, and you start trying to rewrite or create a character who's not a cliché. It's always been my experience that within— sometimes within an hour, and certainly within a day or two, suddenly you'll put something on the screen about Rita that makes you go, 'Wait, wow, wow, if she were to do that, if she was like that, if she said that, then he would—' And you're back into the scene and you're back into the story and all those ugly pages. And I mean, this is why God gave us the delete key. You know, you just highlight those ugly pages and they disappear, and then you try to create something that's expressive and beautiful. And the only way out of despair or depression or, you know, whatever that is, the emotional symptoms of writer's block, the only way out is to write. There is no other, you know. You got it, you understand. You got there writing, you got to get out of it writing.
