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

by Robert McKee

Bring in the Central Plot’s Inciting Incident as soon as possible… but not until the moment is ripe.

An Inciting Incident must “hook” the audience, a deep and complete response. Their response must not only be emotional, but rational. This event must not only pull at audience’s feelings, but cause them to ask the Major Dramatic Question and imagine the Obligatory Scene. Therefore, the location of the Central Plot’s Inciting Incident is found in the answer to this question: How much does the audience need to know about the protagonist and his world to have a full response?

The instant the audience has a sufficient understanding of character and world to react fully, execute your Inciting Incident. Not a scene earlier, or a scene later. The exact moment is found as much by feeling as by analysis.

The quality of the Inciting Incident (for that matter, any event) must be germane to the world, characters, and genre surrounding it. Once it is conceived, the writer must concentrate on its function. Does the Inciting Incident radically upset the balance of forces in the protagonist’s life? Does it arouse in the protagonist the desire to restore balance? Does it inspire in him the conscious desire for that object, material or immaterial, he feels would restore the balance? In a complex protagonist, does it also bring to life an unconscious desire that contradicts his conscious need? Does it launch the protagonist on a quest for his desire? Does it raise the Major Dramatic Question in the mind of the audience? Does it project an image of the Obligatory Scene? If it does all this, then it can be as little as a woman putting her hand on the table, looking at you “that certain way.”

Nothing moves forward in a story except through conflict.

Writers at these extremes fail to realize that while the quality of conflict changes as it shifts from level to level, the quantity of conflict in life is constant. Something is always lacking. Like squeezing a balloon, the volume of conflict never changes, it just bulges in another direction. When we remove conflict from one level of life, it amplifies ten times over on another level.

What is major is relative to what is moderate and minor. If every scene screams to be heard, we go deaf. When too many scenes strive to be powerhouse climaxes, what should be major becomes minor, repetitious, running downhill to a halt. This is why a three-act Central Plot with subplots has become a kind of standard. It fits the creative powers of most writers, provides complexity, and avoids repetition.

subplot may be used to contradict the Controlling Idea of the Central Plot and thus enrich the film with irony.

Subplots may be used to resonate the Controlling Idea of the Central Plot and enrich the film with variations on a theme.

When the Central Plot’s Inciting Incident must be delayed, a setup subplot may be needed to open the storytelling.

A subplot may be used to complicate the Central Plot.

To deemphasize a subplot, some of its elements—Inciting Incident, act climaxes, Crisis, Climax, or Resolution—may be kept offscreen.

The audience understands the principle of aesthetic unity. It knows that every story element is there because of the relationship it strikes to every other element. This relationship, structural or thematic, holds the work together. If the audience can’t find it, it’ll disengage from the story and consciously try to force a unity. When this fails, it sits in confusion.

A scene causes change in a minor, albeit significant way. A Sequence Climax is a scene that causes a moderate reversal— change with more impact than a scene. An Act Climax is a scene that causes a major reversal—change with greater impact than Sequence Climax. Accordingly, we never write a scene that’s merely a flat, static display of exposition; rather we strive for this ideal: to create a story design in which every scene is a minor, moderate, or major Turning Point.

In story, unlike life, you can always go back and fix it. You can set up what may seem absurd and make it rational. Reasoning is secondary and postcreativity. Primary and preconditional to everything else is imagination—the willingness to think any crazy idea, to let images that may or may not make sense find their way to you. Nine out of ten will be useless. Yet one illogical idea may put butterflies in your belly, a flutter that’s telling you something wonderful is hidden in this mad notion. In an intuitive flash you see the connection and realize you can go back and make it make sense. Logic is child’s play. Imagination takes you to the screen.

The understanding of how we create the audience’s emotional experience begins with the realization that there are only two emotions—pleasure and pain. Each has its variations: joy, love, happiness, rapture, fun, ecstasy, thrill, bliss, and many others on one hand, and anguish, dread, anxiety, terror, grief, humiliation, malaise, misery, stress, remorse, and many others on the other hand. But at heart life gives us only one or the other.

First ask, who drives the scene, motivates it, and makes it happen? Any character or force might drive a scene, even an inanimate object or act of nature. Then look into both the text and subtext of this character or force, and ask: What does he (or it) want? Desire is always the key. Phrase this desire (or in the actor’s idiom: scene objective) as an infinitive: such as, “to do this…” or “to get that…”

Next, look across the scene and ask: What forces of antagonism block this desire? Again, these forces may come from any level or combination. After identifying the source of antagonism, ask: What do the forces of antagonism want? This too is best expressed as an infinitive: “Not to do that…” or “To get this instead…” If the scene is well written, when you compare the set of phrases expressing the desires from each side, you’ll see that they’re in direct conflict—not tangential.

A beat is an exchange of action/reaction in character behavior. Look carefully at the scene’s first action on two levels: outwardly, in terms of what the character seems to be doing, and, more important, look beneath the surface to what he is actually doing.

At the end of the scene, examine the value-charged condition of the character’s situation and describe it in positive/negative terms. Compare this note to the one made in Step Two. If the two notations are the same, the activity between them is a nonevent. Nothing has changed, therefore nothing has happened. Exposition may have been passed to the audience, but the scene is flat. If, on the other hand, the value has undergone change, then the scene has turned.

This dilemma confronts the protagonist who, when face-to-face with the most powerful and focused forces of antagonism in his life, must make a decision to take one action or another in a last effort to achieve his Object of Desire.

In Aristotle’s words, an ending must be both “inevitable and unexpected.” Inevitable in the sense that as the Inciting Incident occurs, everything and anything seems possible, but at Climax, as the audience looks back through the telling, it should seem that the path the telling took was the only path. Given the characters and their world as we’ve come to understand it, the Climax was inevitable and satisfying. But at the same time it must be unexpected, happening in a way the audience could not have anticipated.

THE PRINCIPLE OF ANTAGONISM: A protagonist and his story can only be as intellectually fascinating and emotionally compelling as the forces of antagonism make them.

“Forces of antagonism” doesn’t necessarily refer to a specific antagonist or villain. In appropriate genres arch-villains, like the Terminator, are a delight, but by “forces of antagonism” we mean the sum total of all forces that oppose the character’s will and desire.

Begin by identifying the primary value at stake in your story. For example, Justice. Generally, the protagonist will represent the positive charge of this value; the forces of antagonism, the negative. Life, however, is subtle and complex, rarely a case of yes/no, good/evil, right/wrong. There are degrees of negativity. First, the Contradictory value, the direct opposite of the positive. In this case, Injustice. Laws have been broken.

Between the Positive value and its Contradictory, however, is the Contrary: a situation that’s somewhat negative but not fully the opposite. The Contrary of justice is unfairness, a situation that’s negative but not necessarily illegal: nepotism, racism, bureaucratic delay, bias, inequities of all kinds. Perpetrators of unfairness may not break the law, but they’re neither just nor fair.

The famous axiom “Show, don’t tell” is the key. Never force words into a character’s mouth to tell the audience about world, history, or person. Rather, show us honest, natural scenes in which human beings talk and behave in honest, natural ways… yet at the same time indirectly pass along the necessary facts. In other words, dramatize exposition.

Dramatized exposition serves two ends: Its primary purpose is to further the immediate conflict. Its secondary purpose is to convey information. The anxious novice reverses that order, putting expositional duty ahead of dramatic necessity.

Confident writers parse out exposition, bit by bit, through the entire story, often revealing exposition well into the Climax of the last act. They follow these two principles: Never include anything the audience can reasonably and easily assume has happened. Never pass on exposition unless the missing fact would cause confusion. You do not keep the audience’s interest by giving it information, but by withholding information, except that which is absolutely necessary for comprehension.

Pace the exposition. Like all else, exposition must have a progressive pattern: Therefore, the least important facts come in early, the next most important later, the critical facts last. And what are the critical pieces of exposition? Secrets. The painful truths characters do not want known.

Reveal only that exposition the audience absolutely needs and wants to know and no more.

We can turn scenes only one of two ways: on action or on revelation. There are no other means.

Powerful revelations come from the BACKSTORY—previous significant events in the lives of the characters that the writer can reveal at critical moments to create Turning Points.

Second, do not bring in a flashback until you have created in the audience the need and desire to know.

In Mystery the audience knows less than the characters.

First, bring coincidence in early to allow time to build meaning out of it.

Second, never use coincidence to turn an ending. This is deus ex machina, the writer’s greatest sin.

The more time spent with a character, the more opportunity to witness his choices. The result is more empathy and emotional involvement between audience and character.

The unique strength and wonder of the novel is the dramatization of inner conflict. This is what prose does best, far better than play or film.

The unique command and grace of the theatre is the dramatization of personal conflict. This is what the theatre does best, far better than novel or film.

The unique power and splendor of the cinema is the dramatization of extra-personal conflict, huge and vivid images of human beings wrapped inside their society and environment, striving with life. This is what film does best, better than play or novel.

Therefore, the first principle of adaptation: The purer the novel, the purer the play, the worse the film.

“Literary purity” does not mean literary achievement. Purity of novel means a telling located exclusively at the level of inner conflict, employing linguistic complexities to incite, advance, and climax story with relative independence of personal, social, and environmental forces: Joyce’s Ulysses. Purity of theatre means a telling located exclusively at the level of personal conflict, employing the spoken word in poetic excess to incite, advance, and climax story with relative independence of inner, social, and environmental forces: Eliot’s The Cocktail Party.

Attempts to adapt “pure” literature fail for two reasons: One is aesthetic impossibility. Image is prelinguistic; no cinematic equivalences or even approximations exist for conflicts buried in the extravagant language of master novelists and playwrights. Two, when a lesser talent attempts to adapt genius, which is more likely? Will a lesser tale...

Melodrama is not the result of overexpression, but of under motivation; not writing too big, but writing with too little desire. The power of an event can only be as great as the sum total of its causes. We feel a scene is melodramatic if we cannot believe that motivation matches action.

A “hole” is another way to lose credibility. Rather than a lack of motivation, now the story lacks logic, a missing link in the chain of cause and effect. But like coincidence, holes are a part of life. Things often happen for reasons that cannot be explained. So if you’re writing about life, a hole or two may find its way into your telling. The problem is how to handle it.

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.

The key to True Character is desire. In life, if we feel stifled, the fastest way to get unstuck is to ask, “What do I want?,” listen to the honest answer, then find the will to pursue that desire.

Dimension means contradiction: either within deep character (guilt-ridden ambition) or between characterization and deep character (a charming thief). These contradictions must be consistent. It doesn’t add dimension to portray a guy as nice throughout a film, then in one scene have him kick a cat.

Never write anything that calls attentions to itself as dialogue, anything that jumps off the page and shouts: “Oh, what a clever line am I!” The moment you think you’ve written something that’s particularly fine and literary—cut it.