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

by Robert McKee

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

THE PROBLEM OF INTEREST

Curiosity is the intellectual need to answer questions and close open patterns. Story plays to this universal desire by doing the opposite, posing questions and opening situations. Each Turning Point hooks curiosity.

We may make the audience cry or laugh, but above all, as Charles Reade noted, we make it wait.

Mystery, Suspense, Dramatic Irony

Curiosity and Concern create three possible ways to connect the audience to the story: Mystery, Suspense, and Dramatic Irony.

In Mystery the audience knows less than the characters.

Mystery means gaining interest through curiosity alone. We create but then conceal expositional facts, particularly facts in the Backstory.

In the Mystery form the killer and detective know the facts long before Climax but keep it to themselves. The audience runs from behind trying to figure out what the key characters already know.

In Suspense the audience and characters know the same information.

Suspense combines both Curiosity and Concern. Ninety percent of all films, comedy and drama, compel interest in this mode.

Characters and audience move shoulder to shoulder through the telling, sharing the same knowledge. As the characters discover expositional fact, the audience discovers

In this relationship we feel empathy and identify with the protagonist, whereas in pure Mystery our involvement is limited to sympathy.

In Dramatic Irony the audience knows more than the characters.

Dramatic Irony creates interest primarily through concern alone, eliminating curiosity about fact and consequence. Such stories often open with the ending, deliberately giving away the outcome. When the audience is given the godlike superiority of knowing events before they happen, its emotional experience switches.

THE PROBLEM OF MELODRAMA

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.

Characters Are Not Human Beings

A character is no more a human being than the Venus de Milo is a real woman. A character is a work of art, a metaphor for human nature.

Character design begins with an arrangement of the two primary aspects: Characterization and True Character.

To repeat: Characterization is the sum of all the observable qualities, a combination that makes the character unique: physical appearance coupled with mannerisms, style of speech and gesture, sexuality, age, IQ, occupation, personality, attitudes, values, where he lives, how he lives. True Character waits behind this mask. Despite his characterization, at heart who is this person? Loyal or disloyal? Honest or a liar? Loving or cruel? Courageous or cowardly? Generous or selfish? Willful or weak?

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.

A character comes to life the moment we glimpse a clear understanding of his desire—not only the conscious, but in a complex role, the unconscious desire as well.

Behind desire is motivation. Why does your character want what he wants?

Cast Design

In essence, the protagonist creates the rest of the cast. All other characters are in a story first and foremost because of the relationship they strike to the protagonist and the way each helps to delineate the dimensions of the protagonist’s complex nature.

Consider this hypothetical protagonist: He’s amusing and optimistic, then morose and cynical; he’s compassionate, then cruel; fearless, then fearful. This four-dimensional role needs a cast around him to delineate his contradictions, characters toward whom he can act and react in different ways at different times and places. These supporting characters must round him out so that his complexity is both consistent and credible.

Character A, for example, provokes the protagonist’s sadness and cynicism, while Character B brings out his witty, hopeful side. Character C inspires his loving and courageous emotions, while Character D forces him first to cower in fear, then to strike out in fury.

DIALOGUE

Dialogue is not conversation.

Real conversation is full of awkward pauses, poor word choices and phrasing, non sequiturs, pointless repetitions; it seldom makes a point or achieves closure. But that’s okay because conversation isn’t about making points or achieving closure.

First, screen dialogue requires compression and economy. Screen dialogue must say the maximum in the fewest possible words. Second, it must have direction. Each exchange of dialogue must turn the beats of the scene in one direction or another across the changing behaviors, without repetition. Third, it should have purpose. Each line or exchange of dialogue executes a step in design that builds and arcs a scene around its Turning Point.

The Silent Screenplay

The best advice for writing film dialogue is don’t. Never write a line of dialogue when you can create a visual expression. The first attack on every scene should be: How could I write this in a purely visual way and not have to resort to a single line of dialogue? Obey the Law of Diminishing Returns: The more dialogue you write, the less effect dialogue has.

Image is our first choice, dialogue the regretful second choice. Dialogue is the last layer we add to the screenplay.

WRITING FROM THE INSIDE OUT

If, hypothetically and optimistically, a screenplay can be written from first idea to last draft in six months, these writers typically spend the first four of those six months writing on stacks of three-by-five cards: a stack for each act—three, four, perhaps more. On these cards they create the story’s step-outline.

Step-Outline

As the term implies, a step-outline is the stor...

Using one- or two-sentence statements, the writer simply and clearly describes what happens in each s...

On the back of each card the writer indicates what step in the design of the story he sees this scene fulfilling—at least for the moment.

He confines himself to a few stacks of cards for months on end for this critical reason: He wants to destroy his work. Taste and experience tell him that 90 percent of everything he writes, regardless of his genius, is mediocre at best. In his patient search for quality, he must create far more material than he can use, then destroy it.

Finally, after weeks or months, the writer discovers his Story Climax. With that in hand, he reworks, as needed, backward from it.

Treatment

To “treat” the step-outline, the writer expands each scene from its one or two sentences to a paragraph or more of double-spaced, present-tense, moment by moment description:

In treatment the writer indicates what characters talk about—“he wants her to do this, but she refuses,” for example—but never writes dialogue. Instead, he creates the subtext—the true thoughts and feelings underneath what is said and done. We may think we know what our characters are thinking and feeling, but we don’t know we know until we write it down:

SCREENPLAY

Writing from the outside in—writing dialogue in search of scenes, writing scenes in search of story—is the least creative method.

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