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

by Robert McKee

To understand the substance of story and how it performs, you need to view your work from the inside out, from the center of your character, looking out at the world through your character’s eyes, experiencing the story as if you were the living character yourself.

THE PROTAGONIST

Generally, the protagonist is a single character.

For two or more characters to form a Plural-Protagonist, two conditions must be met: First, all individuals in the group share the same desire. Second, in the struggle to achieve this desire, they mutually suffer and benefit. If one has a success, all benefit. If one has a setback, all suffer.

A story may, on the other hand, be Multiprotagonist. Here, unlike the Plural-Protagonist, characters pursue separate and individual desires, suffering and benefiting independently:

no matter whether the story’s protagonist is single, multi or plural, no matter how he is characterized, all protagonists have certain hallmark qualities, and the first is willpower.

A PROTAGONIST is a willful character.

A protagonist’s willpower may be less than that of the biblical Job, but powerful enough to sustain desire through conflict and ultimately take actions that create meaningful and irreversible change.

The PROTAGONIST has a conscious desire.

Rather, the protagonist’s will impels a known desire. The protagonist has a need or goal, an object of desire, and knows it.

The PROTAGONIST may also have a self-contradictory unconscious desire.

However, the most memorable, fascinating characters tend to have not only a conscious but an unconscious desire. Although these complex protagonists are unaware of their subconscious need, the audience senses it, perceiving in them an inner contradiction. The conscious and unconscious desires of a multidimensional protagonist contradict each other.

The PROTAGONIST has the capacities to pursue the Object of Desire convincingly.

The protagonist’s characterization must be appropriate. He needs a believable combination of qualities in the right balance to pursue his desires.

The PROTAGONIST must have at least a chance to attain his desire.

An audience has no patience for a protagonist who lacks all possibility of realizing his desire. The reason is simple: No one believes this of his own life.

The PROTAGONIST has the will and capacity to pursue the object of his conscious and/or unconscious desire to the end of the line, to the human limit established by setting and genre.

The art of story is not about the middle ground, but about the pendulum of existence swinging to the limits, about life lived in its most intense states. We explore the middle ranges of experience, but only as a path to the end of the line.

A STORY must build to a final action beyond which the audience cannot imagine another.

The audience wants to be taken to the limit, to where all questions are answered, all emotion satisfied—the end of the line.

The PROTAGONIST must be empathetic; he may or may not be sympathetic.

Sympathetic means likable.

Empathetic means “like me.” Deep within the protagonist the audience recognizes a certain shared humanity.

THE AUDIENCE BOND

The audience’s emotional involvement is held by the glue of empathy.

Involvement has nothing to do with evoking altruism or compassion. We empathize for very personal, if not egocentric, reasons. When we identify with a protagonist and his desires in life, we are in fact rooting for our own desires in life.

Empathy, therefore, is absolute, while sympathy is optional.

THE FIRST STEP

The grand difference between story and life is that in story we cast out the minutiae of daily existence in which human beings take actions expecting a certain enabling reaction from the world, and, more or less, get what they expect.

In story, we concentrate on that moment, and only that moment, in which a character takes an action expecting a useful reaction from his world, but instead the effect of his action is to provoke forces of antagonism. The world of the character reacts differently than expected, more powerfully than expected, or both.

THE WORLD OF A CHARACTER

A character’s world can be imagined as a series of concentric circles surrounding a core of raw identity or awareness, circles that mark the levels of conflict in a character’s life. The inner circle or level is his own self and conflicts arising from the elements of his nature: mind, body, emotion.

The second circle inscribes personal relationships, unions of intimacy deeper than the social role. Social convention assigns the outer roles we play.

The third circle marks the level of extra-personal conflict—all the sources of antagonism outside the personal: conflict with social institutions and individuals—government/citizen, church/worshipper; corporation/client; conflict with individuals—cop/criminal/victim, boss/worker, customer/waiter, doctor/patient; and conflict with both man-made and natural environments—time, space, and every object in it.

THE GAP

STORY is born in that place where the subjective and objective realms touch.

The protagonist seeks an object of desire beyond his reach. Consciously or unconsciously he chooses to take a particular action, motivated by the thought or feeling that this act will cause the world to react in a way that will be a positive step toward achieving his desire.

But the moment he takes this action, the objective realm of his inner life, personal relationships, or extra-personal world, or a combination of these, react in a way that’s more powerful or different than he expected.

This reaction from his world blocks his desire, thwarting him and bending him further from his desire than he was before he took this action. Rather than evoking cooperation from his world, his action provokes forces of antagonism that open up the gap between his subjective expectation and the objective result, between what he thought would happen when he took his action and what in fact does happen between his sense of probability and true necessity.

Once the gap in reality splits open, the character, being willful and having capacity, senses or realizes that he cannot get what he wants in a minimal, conservative way. He must gather himself and struggle through this gap to take a second action. This next action is something the character would not have wanted to do in the first case because it not only demands more willpower and forces him to dig more deeply into his human capacity, but most important, the second action puts him at risk. He now stands to lose in order to gain.

ON RISK

Here’s a simple test to apply to any story. Ask: What is the risk? What does the protagonist stand to lose if he does not get what he wants? More specifically, what’s the worst thing that will happen to the protagonist if he does not achieve his desire?

If this question cannot be answered in a compelling way, the story is misconceived at its core.

The measure of the value of a character’s desire is in direct proportion to the risk he’s willing to take to achieve it; the greater the value, the greater the risk.

WRITING FROM THE INSIDE OUT

The only reliable source of emotional truth is yourself. If you stay outside your characters, you inevitably write emotional clichés. To create revealing human reactions, you must not only get inside your character, but get inside yourself.

You’ve determined that a certain event must take place in your story, a situation to be progressed and turned. How to write a scene of insightful emotions? You could ask: How should someone take this action? But that leads to clichés and moralizing. Or you could ask: How might someone do this? But that leads to writing “cute”—clever but dishonest. Or: “If my character were in these circumstances, what would he do?” But that puts you at a distance, picturing your character walking the stage of his life, guessing at his emotions, and guesses are invariably clichés.

You ask: “If I were this character in these circumstances, what would I do?” Using Stanislavski’s “Magic if,” you act the role.

When a scene is emotionally meaningful to us, we can trust that it’ll be meaningful to the audience. By creating work that moves us, we move them.

Beat after beat, even in the quietest, most internalized of scenes, a dynamic series of action/reaction/gap, renewed action/surprising reaction/gap builds the scene to and around its Turning Point as reactions amaze and fascinate.