What’s the Worst That Could Possibly Happen in Your Story? Look for the Negative Twist That Reveals Moral Gravity
What McKee means by “Negation of the Negation”
Many forgettable stories never wrestle with the ultimate negative. Their characters may argue, fight, and reconcile, but their souls are never in danger. Their authors protect them and play it safe. And even if the play is colorful and engaging, it’s not about anything meaningful. Or memorable.
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Hello Loreates,
This is Week 3 of the unofficial Robert McKee story breakdown. If you missed installments 1 and 2, here you go:
Today I want to dig into McKee’s concept of the “Negation of the Negation,” which translates, for those who actually want to understand it, as an Ultimate Negative, or worst thing possible within a character’s moral value structure. Not that McKee ever uses the word “moral,” but that is what he’s talking about. Morals being the beliefs or criteria that distinguish good from bad, desire from dread, in a character’s universe.
The Ultimate Negative concept is important for writers to understand because it supplies gravity and complexity to drama, plot, character, and meaning. I found McKee’s explanation of it needlessly confusing, so I’m going to try to streamline it here.
What’s the Worst that Could Possibly Happen?
You have doubtless heard that storytellers must “throw rocks” at their characters. A sequence of events that deliver exactly what the character wants in exactly the way she expects and with the outcome she desires—is not a story. Readers crave and demand struggle, ups and downs, delight and disappointment, triumph and catastrophe. Unexpected wins and losses capture the audience’s attention and keep them in suspense.
But, while stories have a lot in common with ball games, “winning” and “losing” in narrative terms does not mean making one of the same two baskets over and over. If the story’s about a robbery, the reader’s going to need more than physical trading of the stolen goods to hold their attention. Winning and losing will be defined instead by the positive and negative values that drive the characters, many of them subtle and dynamic.
A big part of the game for readers is figuring out what the story’s controlling values are, where they come from, and what winning and losing in this context truly means. To complicate matters, there may be multiple competing sets of values. The “rock” that cripples one character emotionally may be insignificant to another, so it’s imperative for authors to understand the full moral spectrum of concerns for every important character. And, yes, this goes for memoir, too. Every true story is, at its core, a morality tale. Like life.
