This book has touched me more than almost any other non-fiction book, because McKee's approach so utterly relies on human emotion, and on communication without a word. Screenwriting, excluding some artistic European movies and the bad scripts that never make it, works with the triggers that make the roller coaster of experience roll. McKee explains what makes a story different from real life, and teaches the reader how to build and resolve tensions. Make up your world, know your world, and live by its rules as long as you're within the story.

McKee's life experience and philosophy expressed on these pages validates my own, and hence, the margins are full of my notes. One of the quotations stuck with me: "Talent without craft is like fuel without an engine. It burns wildly, but accomplishes nothing."