Storytelling — Harmon vs. McKee

I’ve been on a gigantic yak-shave for the last few months exploring storytelling theories, so I figured I’d start a new blogchain to compile my findings.

The most useful line about storytelling I’ve read so far is this line from Walter Benjamin, quoted at the opening of Reality Hunger:

“All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.”

I realized the line accurately describes all stories I like, and also everything I attempt in my own fiction experiments, whether or not I succeed. Hitchhiker’s Guide, for example, dissolved the genre of space opera. Iain M. Banks’ Culture series resurrected and reinvented it. Storytellers who do one of the two things tend to do at least a little bit of the other as well, but tend to have a preference. It’s like being left or right-handed.

One storyteller who seems particularly good at dissolving genres, and to a lesser extent, inventing them, is Dan Harmon.

Recently, I gave Harmon’s first hit TV show, Community, a second chance, after enjoying Rick and Morty, and was well-rewarded. I ended up bingeing all six seasons in a few weeks. The evolution from the former to the latter is both strikingly evident, and very enjoyable to trace.

The reason I didn’t get into it the first time around was that I mistook it for just another genre-perpetuating ensemble sitcom like Friends. But turns out, it actually dissolves the sort of schmaltzy genre of which Friends is an exemplar. It is a sly takedown of all the tropes and techniques that define shows like Friends.

Rick and Morty too, dissolves the genre pioneered by The Simpsons, the straight-up adult cartoon. Both of Harmon’s shows represent an extreme form of character-driven storytelling at the boundary of realistic and cartoon archetypal characters. To top Rick and Morty you’d have to achieve some sort of fundamental re-invention within the medium of the 22-minute cartoon-show. Community, I think, pretty much killed the traditional sitcom, making way for the currently ascendant genre of Millennial cringe.

The thing about both shows is that they achieve their creative-destructive effects without slipping into typical late-stage styles like Mannerism or Baroque. They exhibit enough skill at the craft of storytelling to tell good stories, but harbor enough disrespect towards craftsmanship as an end in itself to avoid heading down stylistic cul-de-sacs. Instead, they subvert to dissolve, but with real affection for the things being dissolved, rather than either simple hostility or affected meta-ness. Hostility would make a tedious ideological project of dissolution. Affected meta-ness would lead to empty academic exercises. Harmon simply wants to use the genre-dissolution process to scavenge good stories out of the corpses of tired ones.

Harmon is also a very effective theorist of storytelling. His gloss on the Hero’s Journey is the most effective one I’ve seen, and in my opinion superior to better-known versions like Christopher Vogler’s Writer’s Journey or Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat. It’s an 8-step thing he calls the story circle that’s a masterclass in heuristic compression. In the first 3 posts in the series I’ve linked above, he explains the idea visually, then in terms of multiple dichotomies (life/death, conscious/unconscious) and then takes the trouble to simplify it down to eight words before proceeding.

You
Need
Go
Search
Find
Take
Return
Change

I typed that without looking because it’s simple enough I’ve actually memorized it, and am trying to make it second nature. And lately I’ve taken to idly thinking up story ideas in terms of it. It’s one of those rare formulas that liberates instead of confining. And that’s Harmon’s intent. Here is his rationale for this kind of perverse-seeming extreme distillation of guiding theory into formulas:

Sounds like a caveman giving you an order. That’s what it is. Behind (and beneath) your culture creating forebrain, there is an older, simpler monkey brain with a lot less to say and a much louder voice. One of the few things it’s telling you, over and over again, is that you need to go search, find, take and return with change. Why? Because that is how the human animal has kept from going extinct, it’s how human societies keep from collapsing and how you keep from walking into McDonald’s with a machine gun.

I’ll have more to say about Harmon’s stuff later in this blogchain, but here I’ll just note that this kind of extreme compression of an operating model is also characteristic of the most effective business executives I’ve worked with. They take ideas that would normally fill entire dense books in the hands of business academics, and distill them down to a set of the most important elements. And they do so in such compressed and memorable ways, they don’t forget them even when stressed, sleep-deprived, and worked off their feet.

This is one of the reasons I rely so much on 2x2s in my consulting work. It’s the same kind of caveman distillation of what could easily be big fluffy airport business books.

Robert McKee is sort of the anti-Harmon. His 1997 book Story, based on his famous seminar, is the gold standard for Hollywood screenwriters. But I found it turgid and nearly unreadable when I first encountered it sometime around 2003. More recently, I read and, to my slight surprise kinda enjoyed, his 2016 book, Dialogue, which inspired me to give Story another go. But Story remains as turgid and unreadable as I remember. You almost feel guilty for not liking the book because he is so clearly and sincerely in love with storytelling in all its forms, and there is so much of real utility in the books if you manage to grind through them.

I’m apparently not the only one who struggles to appreciate McKee. Somebody recently pointed out to me that a classic pair of scenes in the 2002 Nicholas Cage classic, Adaptation is actually a satirical takedown of McKee and the little pedagogical industrial complex he’s established (I think I watched the movie before I knew who McKee was, so I never made the connection).

McKee’s books are exhausting analytical teardowns of every aspect of storytelling, but reading him, you can’t help feeling that he’s missing something big and central. It feels like he is covering every aspect except for some elusive central one. Like he’s talking around the topic instead of about it.

It feels like he’s missing something highly successful practitioners like Harmon understand in their bones, and try to articulate as clearly as possible by stripping away everything else. Harmon’s eight-word Hero’s Journey — you, need, go, search, find, take, return, CHANGE — is about as close as you can get to the ineffable void at the heart of story. The specific psychological conceits of the Hero’s Journey in all its versions don’t matter. What matters is trying to circle the essence any way you can. Harmon does it as tightly and deliberately as he can. McKee seems not to recognize that it needs doing.

McKee’s preachy insistence on the primacy of craft, the spiritually elevating value of hard work, and the importance of a perfectionist overwork ethic are, I think, “tells” that he doesn’t quite get the soul of story despite clearly being a genuine lover of storytelling. It reminds me of the hustleporn spouted by not-quite-successful entrepreneurs for the benefit of wantapreneurs. How-not-to-fail theories masquerading as how-to-succeed theories.

This is evident in his selection of examples to discuss in both books. They’re all over the place, and not just because he’s trying to inject variety into his examples. McKee clearly loves any kind of movie so long as it is a great showcase of what he sees as the essence of the craft. He has no thematic or stylistic preferences besides perhaps a preference for drama over comedy. He has taste of sorts, but it’s a technician’s taste. The kind of taste that picks out stories told well, but not the kind that picks out stories worth telling, for a particular storyteller, which I think is the kind of taste working storytellers need more. In fact, early in Story he argues pretty stridently (and in my view, entirely wrong-headedly) that it’s all in the telling; that how you tell a tale is overwhelmingly more important than the choice of which tale to tell. But he’s unable to see the connection between his own advice and his observation that Hollywood is desperate for good stories.

It can feel downright intimidating for newbie storytellers like me to even dare think the thought that a veritable institution like McKee might be missing something big about a topic he’s written and talked so much about, over such a long career. It can feel blasphemous to harbor the sneaking suspicion that McKee belabors the less essential things he can see because he can’t see the important things. But reading the Harmon end of caveman-grade theorizing inspires some confidence in the impulse to set McKee aside, as at best a secondary reference for when you run into specific bugs that need fixing. You’re not going to learn how to breathe life into stories via his books or seminar. But you might pick up a few first-aid tips and maybe even a life-saving surgery technique or two.

So what’s going on with McKee? Is it simply a case of those who can do, those who can’t teach?

I think there’s more to it.

Here’s what I think is going on: McKee is the Antoine-Henri Jomini of storytelling.

I wouldn’t expect you to recognize the name, since it’s an obscure military-history nerd thing, but Jomini (1779-1869) was the most famous theorist of Napoleon’s campaigns in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. But today, he is basically an unknown obscurity. On the other hand, Carl von Clausewitz (1792-1831), who was an obscure figure then, is now regarded as the most important contemporaneous theorist of Napoleon’s campaigns, and the thinker most responsible for distilling the actual important lessons from that era of military history for future students.

The thing is, Jomini both lacked, and failed to appreciate, the importance of what William Duggan called strategic intuition, in a book of the same name. Clausewitz on the other hand, not only appreciated it as the essence of Napoleon’s strategic successes, but theorized it carefully and gave it a name — the coup d’oeil, or what I called a “cheap trick” in Tempo. Napoleon had that cultivated mix of preparation and genius to see the essence of a strategy problem, and the right solution to it, “at a glance.” But it’s not a mysterious, ineffable skill. It’s one that yields at least partly to analysis, and lends itself to systematic cultivation. It just didn’t occur to Jomini to even attempt the analysis, but it did to Clausewitz.

Just to underline the robustness of the archetypal dichotomy, another Jomini/Clausewitz pair, more familiar to modern audiences, is Michael Porter/Clayton Christensen.

Porter was, for the longest time, the more “famous” business strategy professor, but his books always struck me the way McKee’s books do — grinding slogs you kinda have to work through enough to get familiar with, but missing some essential central idea in a deep way.

The late Clay Christensen on the other hand, truly got business strategy. Whether or not you like the theory of disruption, actual business executives and entrepreneurs in the last three decades have gotten, in my opinion, vastly more out of Christensen’s theories than out of Porter’s. While I don’t think Christensen ever got the theory of disruption down to eight words, it has that same memorable and high-utility compressibility. You could reduce the essence of his work to something like “serve underserved marginal markets to attack the core.” Christensen had strategic intuition. Porter sort of understands what is sometimes called strategy operations — the spreadsheets and block diagrams you make in the process of figuring out strategy.

Back to storytelling.

If McKee is a Jomini, or Porter Dan Harmon is at least a Clausewitz or Christensen. Perhaps even a John Boyd. The Story Circle is almost as sophisticated as Boyd’s OODA loop. I suspect the big difference between McKee and Harmon is not that the latter is a practicing successful storyteller with two arguably great works (by Walter Benjamin’s definition) under his belt, but the fact that he does not over-respect the craft to the point that it obscures strategic intuition. The visible tell is that his stories radiate the joy of storytelling, rather than the grind of it.

The Jominis, Porters, and McKees of the world miss the forest for the trees because they keep adding more and more excruciating detail to their theorizing, relentlessly searching for the essence but always heading away from it. To the extent they approach strategic intuition at all, they do so via brute force extrapolation of tactical excellence.

On the other hand, the Clausewitzes, Boyds, Christensens, and Harmons of the world get to “good enough” on tactical competence, and then brutally strip away everything that gets in the way of strategic intuition. The result is stories that sometimes have rough edges in terms of technique and craft, but nail the strategic core so well you don’t even notice.

To keep it specific, I’ll call the storytelling version of strategic intuition narrative intuition. Harmon appreciates, possesses, and values narrative intuition in spades, and it shows in his attention to the choice of stories to tell over the details of how to tell them.

McKee dimly senses the existence of such a thing, but heads off in exactly the wrong direction in search of it, and ends up venerating and fetishizing craft instead. His ends up, therefore, at an essentially Straussian posture — a scholar of Great Storytellers, but not of Greatness in Storytelling.

This is not a bad thing. The world needs hard-working, scholarly worshippers of craft too. There is much to be learned from McKee’s books, even if they are a slog to get through. But for developing narrative intuition, Harmon’s 8-word caveman grunts are a vastly superior guide.

To circle back to the Walter Benjamin quote, if great works dissolve or invent genres, perhaps not-so-great works perpetuate and refine them, tempting connoisseurs of craft down exactly the wrong path in search of the essence of story.

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