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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Robert McKee
Read between
July 6 - August 6, 2019
The young are taught that Hollywood and art are antithetical. The novice, therefore, wanting to be recognized as an artist, falls into the trap of writing a screenplay not for what it is, but for what it’s not. He avoids closure, active characters, chronology, and causality to avoid the taint of commercialism. As a result, pretentiousness poisons his work.
A story is the embodiment of our ideas and passions in Edmund Husserl’s phrase, “an objective correlative” for the feelings and insights we wish to instill in the audience. When you work with one eye on your script and the other on Hollywood, making eccentric choices to avoid the taint of commercialism, you produce the literary equivalent of a temper tantrum.
Write only what you believe.
the source of all clichés can be traced to one thing and one thing alone: The writer does not know the world of his story.
Such writers select a setting and launch a screenplay assuming a knowledge of their fictional world that they don’t have. As they reach into their minds for material, they come up empty. So where do they run? To films and TV, novels and plays with similar settings. From the works of other writers they crib scenes we’ve seen before, paraphrase dialogue we’ve heard before, disguise characters we’ve met before, and pass them off as their own. They reheat literary leftovers and serve up plates of boredom because, regardless of their talents, they lack an in-depth understanding of their story’s
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A story’s SETTING is four-dimensional—Period, Duration, Location, Level of Conflict.
The first dimension of time is Period. Is the story set in the contemporary world? In history? A hypothetical future?
PERIOD is a story’s place in time.
Duration is the second dimension of time. How much time does the story span within the lives of your characters? Decades? Years? Months? Days?
DURATION is a story’s length through time.
Location is the story’s physical dimension. What is the story’s specific geography? In what town? On what streets? What buildings on those streets? What rooms inside those buildings? Up what mountain? Across what desert? A voyage to what planet?
LOCATION is a story’s place in space.
Level of Conflict is the human dimension. A setting includes not only its physical and temporal domain, but social as well. This dimension becomes vertical in this sense: At what Level of Conflict do you pitch your telling? No matter how externalized in institutions or internalized in individuals, the political, economic, ideological, biological, and psychological forces of society shape events as much as period, landscape, or costume. Therefore, the cast of characters, containing its various levels of conflict, is part of a story’s setting.
Does your story focus on the inner, even unconscious conflicts within your characters? Or coming up a level, on personal conflicts? Or higher and wider, on battles with institutions in society? Wider still, on struggles against forces of the environment?
LEVEL OF CONFLICT is the story’s position on the hierarchy of human struggles.
The Relationship Between Structure and Setting
A story’s setting sharply defines and confines its possibilities.
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.
Each fictional world creates a unique cosmology and makes its own “rules” for how and why things happen within it.
Stories do not materialize from a void but grow out of materials already in history and human experience.
Seen this way, the setting may feel like a straitjacket to the imagination.
THE PRINCIPLE OF CREATIVE LIMITATION
Limitation is vital. The first step toward a well-told story is to create a small, knowable world. Artists by nature crave freedom, so the principle that the structure/setting relationship restricts creative choices may stir the rebel in you. With a closer look, however, you’ll see that this relationship couldn’t be more positive. The constraint that setting imposes on story design doesn’t inhibit creativity; it inspires it.
Art consists of separating one tiny piece from the rest of the universe and holding it up in such a way that it appears to be the most important, fascinating thing of this moment.
The irony of setting versus story is this: The larger the world, the more diluted the knowledge of the writer, therefore the fewer his creative choices and the more clichéd the story. The smaller the world, the more complete the knowledge of the writer, therefore the greater his creative choices. Result: a fully original story and victory in the war on cliché.
RESEARCH
The key to winning this war is research, taking the time and effort to acquire knowledge. I suggest these specific methods: research of memory, r...
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Memory
Lean back from your desk and ask, “What do I know from personal experience that touches on my characters’ lives?”
Explore your past, relive it, then write it down. In your head it’s only memory, but written down it becomes working knowledge. Now with the bile of fear in your belly, write an honest, one-of-a-kind scene.
Imagination
Lean back and ask, “What would it be like to live my character’s life hou...
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In vivid detail sketch how your characters shop, make love, pray—scenes that may or may not find their way into your story, but draw you into your imagined world until it feels like déja vu. While memory gives us whole chunks of life, imagination takes fragments, slivers of dream, and chips of experience that seem unrelated, then seeks their hidden connections and merges them into a whole. ...
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Fact
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You’re blocked because you have nothing to say. Your talent didn’t abandon you. If you had something to say, you couldn’t stop yourself from writing.
Talent must be stimulated by facts and ideas. Do research. Feed your talent.
Biographical, psychological, physical, political, and historical research of the setting and cast is essential but pointless if it doesn’t lead to the creation of events. A story is not an accumulation of information strung into a narrative, but a design of events to carry us to a meaningful climax.
CREATIVE CHOICES
The craft demands the invention of far more material than you can possibly use, then the astute selection from this quantity of quality events, moments of originality that are true to character and true to world.
CREATIVITY means creative choices of inclusion and exclusion.
experienced writers never trust so-called inspiration. More often than not, inspiration is the first idea picked off the top of your head, and sitting on the top of your head is every film you’ve ever seen, every novel you’ve ever read, offering clichés to pluck.
Genius consists not only of the power to create expressive beats and scenes, but of the taste, judgment, and will to weed out and destroy banalities, conceits, false notes, and lies.
The principle of Creative Limitation calls for freedom within a circle of obstacles. Talent is like a muscle: without something to push against, it atrophies. So we deliberately put rocks in our path, barriers that inspire. We discipline ourselves as to what to do, while we’re boundless as to how to do it.
Generally, great writers are not eclectic. Each tightly focuses his oeuvre on one idea, a single subject that ignites his passion, a subject he pursues with beautiful variation through a lifetime of work.
Do you, like Hemingway and Dickens, work directly from the life you’ve lived? Or, like Molière, do you write about your ideas of society and human nature?
We cannot ask which is more important, structure or character, because structure is character; character is structure.
CHARACTER VERSUS CHARACTERIZATION
Characterization is the sum of all observable qualities of a human being, everything knowable through careful scrutiny: age and IQ; sex and sexuality; style of speech and gesture; choices of home, car, and dress; education and occupation; personality and nervosity; values and attitudes—all aspects of humanity we could know by taking notes on someone day in and day out.
This singular assemblage of traits is characterization … but it is not character.
