Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting

by Robert McKee

When you go to the movies, don’t you often feel you’re more intelligent than what you’re watching? That you know what characters are going to do before they do it? That you see the ending coming long before it arrives? The audience is not only smart, it’s smarter than most films, and that fact won’t change when you move to the other side of the screen. It’s all a writer can do, using every bit of craft he’s mastered, to keep ahead of the sharp perceptions of a focused audience.

Each year, Hollywood produces and/or distributes four hundred to five hundred films, virtually a film per day. A few are excellent, but the majority are mediocre or worse.

For talent without craft is like fuel without an engine. It burns wildly but accomplishes nothing.

STRUCTURE is a selection of events from the characters’ life stories that is composed into a strategic sequence to arouse specific emotions and to express a specific view of life.

For example: alive/dead (positive/negative) is a story value, as are love/hate, freedom/slavery, truth/lie, courage/cowardice, loyalty/betrayal, wisdom/stupidity, strength/weakness, excitement/boredom and so on. All such binary qualities of experience that can reverse their charge at any moment are Story Values.

For a typical film, the writer will choose forty to sixty Story Events or, as they’re commonly known, scenes.

The scene has activity—talking about this, doing that—but nothing changes in value. It is a nonevent.

Beats build scenes. Scenes then build the next largest movement of story design, the Sequence.

Scenes cause relatively minor yet significant change. The capping scene of a sequence, however, delivers a more powerful, determinant change.

A series of acts builds the largest structure of all: the Story.

STORY CLIMAX: A story is a series of acts that build to a last act climax or story climax which brings about absolute and irreversible change.

The Archplot delivers a closed ending—all questions raised by the story are answered; all emotions evoked are satisfied. The audience leaves with a rounded, closed experience—nothing in doubt, nothing unsated.

Miniplot, on the other hand, often leaves the ending somewhat open. Most of the questions raised by the telling are answered, but an unanswered question or two may trail out of the film, leaving the audience to supply it subsequent to the viewing. Most of the emotion evoked by the film will be satisfied, but an emotional residue may be left for the audience to satisfy.

A Story Climax of absolute, irreversible change that answers all questions raised by the telling and satisfies all audience emotion is a CLOSED ENDING. A Story Climax that leaves a question or two unanswered and some emotion unfulfilled is an OPEN ENDING.

An ACTIVE PROTAGONIST, in the pursuit of desire, takes action in direct conflict with the people and the world around him. A PASSIVE PROTAGONIST is outwardly inactive while pursuing desire inwardly, in conflict with aspects of his or her own nature.

A story that either skips helter-skelter through time or so blurs temporal continuity that the audience cannot sort out what happens before and after what is told in NONLINEAR TIME.

The young are taught that Hollywood and art are antithetical. The novice, therefore, wanting to be recognized as an artist, falls into the trap of writing a screenplay not for what it is, but for what it’s not. He avoids closure, active characters, chronology, and causality to avoid the taint of commercialism. As a result, pretentiousness poisons his work.

A story’s SETTING is four-dimensional—Period, Duration, Location, Level of Conflict.

PERIOD is a story’s place in time. Duration is the second dimension of time. How much time does the story span within the lives of your characters? Decades? Years? Months? Days?

LEVEL OF CONFLICT is the story’s position on the hierarchy of human struggles.

There is no such thing as a portable story. An honest story is at home in one, and only one, place and time.

BIOGRAPHY, however, must never become a simple chronicle. That someone lived, died, and did interesting things in between is of scholarly interest and no more. The biographer must interpret facts as if they were fiction, find the meaning of the subject’s life, and then cast him as the protagonist of his life’s genre:

In Comedy, the audience must feel that no matter how characters bounce off walls, no matter how they scream and writhe under the whips of life, it doesn’t really hurt.

Never assume that because you’ve seen films in your genre you know it. This is like assuming you could compose a symphony because you have heard all nine of Beethoven’s. You must study the form.

Next, rent the films on video and purchase the screenplays if possible. Then study the films stop and go, turning pages with the screen, breaking each film down into elements of setting, role, event, and value.

Positioning of the audience is nothing new. Shakespeare didn’t call his play Hamlet; he called it The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. He gave comedies titles such as Much Ado About Nothing and All’s Well That Ends Well, so that each afternoon at the Globe Theatre his Elizabethan audience was psychologically set to cry or laugh.

Characterization is the sum of all observable qualities of a human being, everything knowable through careful scrutiny: age and IQ; sex and sexuality; style of speech and gesture; choices of home, car, and dress; education and occupation; personality and nervosity; values and attitudes—all aspects of humanity we could know by taking notes on someone day in and day out.

TRUE CHARACTER is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure—the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character’s essential nature.

But regardless of genre, the principle is universal: the story’s meaning, whether comic or tragic, must be dramatized in an emotionally expressive Story Climax without the aid of explanatory dialogue.