Monkey read and liked A.J.'s review of Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting:

"I think this is the first time where I read a book solely based off a scene in a movie. The scene can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VseQe4TF...

Lines like, "You cannot have a protagonist without desire! It doesn't mak...more I think this is the first time where I read a book solely based off a scene in a movie. The scene can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VseQe4TF...

Lines like, "You cannot have a protagonist without desire! It doesn't make sense! ANY. F****NG. SENSE!" and "WHY THE F*** WOULD YOU WASTE MY TWO PRECIOUS HOURS WITH YOUR MOVIE? I DON'T HAVE ANY USE FOR IT! ANY. BLOODY. USE FOR IT!" more or less had me drooling. For those of you who don't know anything about Robert McKee, he's the writing teacher you wished you had all those years when you were sitting around listening to some other flaccid asshole mumble nonsense about Freudian tropes and postmodern deconstructionism when all you wanted to know was why the hell you were reading a thirty-page story about a guy counting raindrops on a window.

Successful playwrights, screenwriters, and novelists across the globe have made him a fascinating staple of the fiction community. His premise is pretty simple: storytelling has gone to hell for a number of reasons, but one of them is that we no longer teach the fundamentals of story construction. We learn about books from the outside in, never the inside out. There's a reason works like Hamlet, Casablanca, and Star Wars all have an endearing quality. They all have something in common. And that something is story.

But at risk of sounding like a cultist, I'll forego summarizing his whole approach and simply mention a few things. If you're looking for the answer to the question of What makes good writing, keep looking, because it isn't here. McKee doesn't claim he can polish a turd into Dune, but he can provide you with a very practical way to examine your own work, and a way to think about your story that puts things in perspective. If you happen to be in the editing stages of a project and just can't seem to figure out what's missing, you might find some useful tools here to see your way through.

Whether or not you buy into McKee's 'system,' you can't argue his passion. This is a book filled to the brim with insight, heart, and common sense. McKee talks Story from the heights of Shakespeare to the grit of Reservoir Dogs, discussing what works for every form of storytelling, why it works that way, and how a prospective writing talent can tap into forms, not formulas, that have worked for centuries. And he loves it all, what's more.

I can't claim any sort of midnight conversion. I haven't given my heart to McKee. But I sure as hell would shake his hand and say, Thank you, sir, for being one of few people who talks about the single, unarguable, undeniable, Lord-on-high most important part of writing: telling a story. A good one.

A very useful book. If you give a hoot about storytelling, I'd suggest you give it a glance.

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