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

by Robert McKee

But for those protagonists we tend to admire the most, the Inciting Incident arouses not only a conscious desire, but an unconscious one as well.

These complex characters suffer intense inner battles because these two desires are in direct conflict with each other.

No matter what the character consciously thinks he wants, the audience senses or realizes that deep inside he uncon...

The Spine is the deep desire in and effort by the protagonist to restore the balance of life.

For better or worse, an event throws a character’s life out of balance, arousing in him the conscious and/or unconscious desire for that which he feels will restore balance, launching him on a Quest for his Object of Desire against forces of antagonism (inner, personal, extra-personal). He may or may not achieve it. This is story in a nutshell.

The Obligatory Scene (AKA Crisis) is an event the audience knows it must see before the story can end.

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 an...

If we writers have a common fault in design and placement of the Inciting Incident, it’s that we habitually delay the Central Plot while we pack our opening sequences with exposition.

We consistently underestimate knowledge and life experience of the audience, laying out our characters and world with tedious details the filmgoer has already filled in with common sense.

The quality of the Inciting Incident (for that matter, any event) must be germane to the world, characters, and genre surrounding it.

In a complex protagonist, does it also bring to life an unconscious desire that contradicts his conscious need?

What is the worst possible thing that could happen to my protagonist? How could that turn out to be the best possible thing that could happen to him?

The second element of the five-part design is Progressive Complications: that great sweeping body of story that spans from Inciting Incident to Crisis/Climax of the final act.

To complicate means to make life difficult for characters. To complicate progressively means to generate more and more conflict as they face greater and greater forces of antagonism, creating a succession of events that passes points of no return.

To begin the pursuit of his desire, he takes a minimum, conservative action to provoke a positive response from his reality.

But the effect of his action is to arouse forces of antagonism from inner, personal, or social/environmental Levels of Conflict that block his desire, cracking open the Gap between expectation and result.

When the Gap opens, the audience realizes that this is a point of no return. Min...

The character can’t restore the balance of life by taking lesser actions. Henceforth, all action like the character’s first effort, actions of minor quality and ...

A story must not retreat to actions of lesser quality or magnitude, but move progressively forward to a final action beyond which the audience cannot imagine another.

In the middle of Act Two he’s given his characters lesser actions of the kind they’ve already done in Act One—not identical actions but actions of a similar size or kind: minimal, conservative, and by now trivial.

The only way to keep a film’s current flowing and rising is research—imagination, memory, fact.

When the protagonist steps out of the Inciting Incident, he enters a world governed by the Law of Conflict. To wit: Nothing moves forward in a story except through conflict.

The Law of Conflict is more than an aesthetic principle; it is the soul of story. Story is metaphor for life, and to be alive is to be in seemingly perpetual conflict.

Their scripts fail for one of two reasons: either a glut of meaningless and absurdly violent conflict, or a vacancy of meaningful and honestly expressed 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.

To achieve complexity the writer brings his characters into conflict on all three levels of life, often simultaneously.

design relatively simple but complex stories.

Beats, changing patterns of human behavior, build scenes.

Ideally, every scene becomes a Turning Point in which the values at stake swing from the positive to the negative or the negative to the positive, creating significant but minor change in their lives.

A series of scenes build a sequence that culminates in a scene that has a moderate impact on the characters, turning or changing values for better or...

A series of sequences builds an act that climaxes in a scene that creates a major reversal in the characters’ lives, grea...

three acts is the minimum.

The dynamics of story depend on the alternation of its value-charges.

Working back from the Penultimate Climax to the opening scene, previous act climaxes are further apart, often with subplot and sequence climaxes coming into emotional play between them, creating a unique rhythm of positive and negative turnings.

A 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.

A subplot may be used to complicate the Central Plot.

a scene is unified around desire, action, conflict, and change.

But this Scene-Objective must be an aspect of his Super-Objective or Spine, the story-long quest that spans from Inciting Incident to Story Climax.

The effects of Turning Points are fourfold: surprise, increased curiosity, insight, and new direction.

To tell story is to make a promise: If you give me your concentration, I’ll give you surprise followed by the pleasure of discovering life, its pains and joys, at levels and in directions you have never imagined. And most important, this must be done with such seeming ease and naturalness that we lead the audience to these discoveries as if spontaneously. The effect of a beautifully turned moment is that filmgoers experience a rush of knowledge as if they did it for themselves.

First, last, and always, self-expression occurs in the flood of insight that pours out of a Turning Point.

weak storytelling resorts to substituting information for insight.

Step One: Define Conflict

First ask, who drives the scene, motivates it, and makes it happen?

Then look into both the text and subtext of this character or force, and ask: Wh...