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

by Robert McKee

A STORY EVENT creates meaningful change in the life situation of a character that is expressed and experienced in terms of a VALUE.

STORY VALUES are the universal qualities of human experience that may shift from positive to negative, or negative to positive, from one moment to the next.

The function of STRUCTURE is to provide progressively building pressures that force characters into more and more difficult dilemmas where they must make more and more difficult risk-taking choices and actions, gradually revealing their true natures, even down to the unconscious self.

A CONTROLLING IDEA may be expressed in a single sentence describing how and why life undergoes change from one condition of existence at the beginning to another at the end.

Sequence by sequence, often scene by scene, the positive Idea and its negative Counter-Idea argue, so to speak, back and forth, creating a dramatized dialectical debate.

In creating the dimensions of your story’s “argument,” take great care to build the power of both sides.

The INCITING INCIDENT radically upsets the balance of forces in the protagonist’s life.

The Crisis decision must be a deliberately static moment. This is the Obligatory Scene. Do not put it offscreen, or skim over it. The audience wants to suffer with the protagonist through the pain of this dilemma.

Generally, progressions run from the Positive to the Contrary in Act One, to the Contradictory in later acts, and finally to the Negation of the Negation in the last act, either ending tragically or going back to the Positive with a profound difference.

TRUE CHARACTER can only be expressed through choice in dilemma. How the person chooses to act under pressure is who he is—the greater the pressure, the truer and deeper the choice to character.