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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Robert McKee
Started reading
May 8, 2017
What we create for the world, what it demands of us, is story.
“Good story” means something worth telling that the world wants to hear.
Your goal must be a good story well told.
The first is literary talent—the creative conversion of ordinary language into a higher, more expressive form, vividly describing the world and capturing its human voices.
The second is story talent—the creative conversion of life itself to a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience.
Literary and story talent are not only distinctively different but are unrelated,
Story talent is primary, literary talent secondary but essential.
This principle is absolute
But no one element, in and of itself, will build a story.
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.
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.
A Story Event creates meaningful change in the life situation of a character that is expressed and experienced in terms of a value and ACHIEVED THROUGH CONFLICT.
A SCENE is an action through conflict in more or less continuous time and space that turns the value-charged condition of a character’s life on at least one value with a degree of perceptible significance. Ideally, every scene is a STORY EVENT.
A BEAT is an exchange of behavior in action/reaction. Beat by Beat these changing behaviors shape the turning of a scene.
A SEQUENCE is a series of scenes—generally two to five—that culminates with greater impact than any previous scene.
An ACT is a series of sequences that peaks in a climactic scene which causes a major reversal of values, more powerful in its impact than any previous sequence or scene.
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.
To PLOT means to navigate through the dangerous terrain of story and when confronted by a dozen branching possibilities to choose the correct path. Plot is the writer’s choice of events and their design in time.
A story’s SETTING is four-dimensional—Period, Duration, Location, Level of Conflict.
PERIOD is a story’s place in time.
DURATION is a story’s length through time.
LOCATION is a story’s place in space.
LEVEL OF CONFLICT is the story’s position on the hierarchy of human struggles.
A STORY must obey its own internal laws of probability. The event choices of the writer, therefore, are limited to the possibilities and probabilities within the world he creates.
EDUCATION PLOT. This genre arcs on a deep change within the protagonist’s view of life, people, or self from the negative (naive, distrustful, fatalistic, self-hating) to the positive (wise, trusting, optimistic, self-possessed):
Murder Mystery
Characterization is the sum of all observable qualities of a human being,
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.
The only way to know the truth is to witness him make choices under pressure
Pressure is essential.
they cannot be at heart what they seem to be at face.
The finest writing not only reveals true character, but arcs or changes that inner nature, for better or worse, over the course of the telling.
the story puts greater and greater pressure on him to make more and more difficult choices:
by the climax of the story, these choices have profoundly changed the humanity of the character:
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.
The function of CHARACTER is to bring to the story the qualities of characterization necessary to convincingly act out choices. Put simply, a character must be credible: young enough or old enough, strong or weak, worldly or naive, educated or ignorant, generous or selfish, witty or dull, in the right proportions. Each must bring to the story the combination of qualities that allows an audience to believe that the character could and would do what he does.
The choices that characters make from behind their outer masks simultaneously shape their inner natures and propel the story.
story is first, last, and always the experience of aesthetic emotion—the simultaneous encounter of thought and feeling.
Life on its own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos, but aesthetic emotion harmonizes what you know with what you feel to give you a heightened awareness and a sureness of your place in reality.
story is, at heart, nonintellectual.
It triumphs in the marriage of the rational with the irrational.
Two ideas bracket the creative process: Premise, the idea that inspires the writer’s desire to create a story, and Controlling Idea, the story’s ultimate meaning expressed through the action and aesthetic emotion of the last act’s climax.
A Premise,
What would happen if … ?
For an artist must have not only ideas to express, but ideas to prove.
The audience must not just understand; it must believe.
STORYTELLING is the creative demonstration of truth. A story is the living proof of an idea, the conversion of idea to action. A story’s event structure is the means by which you first express, then prove your idea … without explanation.
I prefer the phrase Controlling Idea, for like theme, it names a story’s root or central idea, but it also implies function: The Controlling Idea shapes the writer’s strategic choices.
