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

by Robert McKee

Research from memory, imagination, and fact is often followed by a phenomenon that authors love to describe in mystical terms: Characters suddenly spring to life and of their own free will make choices and take actions that create Turning Points that twist, build, and turn again until the writer can hardly type fast enough to keep up with the outpourings. This “virgin birth” is a charming self-deception writers love to indulge in, but the sudden impression that the story is writing itself simply marks the moment when a writer’s knowledge of the subject has reached the saturation point. The

writer becomes the god of his little universe and is amazed by what seems to be spontaneous creation, but is in fact the reward for hard work.

Which scene is truest to my characters? Truest to their world? And has never been on the screen quite this way before?

No matter our talent, we all know in the midnight of our souls that 90 percent of what we do is less than our best. If, however, research inspires a pace of ten to one, even twenty to one, and if you then make brilliant choices to find that 10 percent of excellence and burn the rest, every scene will fascinate and the world will sit in awe of your genius.

The genre sophistication of filmgoers presents the writer with this critical challenge: He must not only fulfill audience anticipations, or risk their confusion and disappointment, but he must lead their expectations to fresh, unexpected moments, or risk boring them. This two-handed trick is impossible without a knowledge of genre that surpasses the audience’s.

For while it’s true that the unexamined life is not worth living, it’s also the case that the unlived life isn’t worth examining.

Each writer’s homework is first to identify his

genre, then research its governing practices. And there’s no escaping these tasks. We’re all genre writers.

GENRE CONVENTIONS are specific settings, roles, events, and values that define individual genres and their subgenres.

By genre convention, the comedy writer walks the line between putting characters through the torments of hell while safely reassuring the audience that the flames don’t really burn.

Hitchcock knew that there is no necessary contradiction between art and popular success, nor a necessary connection between art and Art Film.

Genre study is best done in this fashion: First, list all those works you feel are like yours, both successes and failures. (The study of failures is illuminating

… and humbling.) Next, rent the films on video and purchase the screenplays if possible. Then study the films stop and go, turning pages with the screen, breaking each film down into elements of setting, role, event, and value. Lastly, stack, so to speak, these analyses one atop the other and look down through them all asking: What do the stories in my genre always do? What are its conventions of time, place, character, and action? Until you discover answers, the audience will always be ahead of you.

CREATIVE LIMITATIONS Robert Frost said that writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down, for it’s the self-imposed, indeed artificial demands of poetic conventions that stir the imagination.

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.

One of our first steps, therefore, is to identify the genre or combination of genres that govern our work, for the stony ground that grows the most fruitful ideas is genre convention. Genre conventions are the rhyme scheme of a storyteller’s “poem.” They do not inhibit creativi...

Rather than deny convention and flatten the story, the fine writer calls on conventions like old friends, knowing that in the struggle to fulfill them in a unique way, he may find inspiration for the scene that will lift his story above the ordinary. With mastery of genre we can guide audiences through rich, creative variations on convention to reshape and exceed expectations by giving the audience not only what it had hoped for but, if we’re very good, more than it could have imagined.

For genres are simply windows on reality, various ways for the writer to look at life.

The Love Story The most important question we ask when writing a Love Story is: “What’s to stop them?” For where’s the story in a Love Story? Two people meet, fall in love, marry, raise a family, support each other till death do them part … what could be more boring than that? So, for over two thousand years, since the Greek dramatist Menander, writers answered the question with “the parents of the girl.” Her parents find the young man unsuitable and become the convention known as Blocking Characters or “the force opposed to love.” Shakespeare expanded it to both sets of parents in Romeo and Juliet. From 2300 B.C. this essential convention went unchanged … until the twentieth century launched the romantic revolution.

The twentieth century has been an Age of Romance like no other. The idea of romantic love (with sex as its implicit partner) dominates popular music, advertising, and Western culture in general. Over the decades, the automobile, telephone, and a thousand other liberating factors have given young lovers greater and greater freedom from parental control. Meanwhile, parents, thanks to the rampant rise in adultery, divorce, and remarriage, have extended romance from a youthful fling to a lifelong pursuit. It’s always been the case that young people don’t listen to their parents, but today, if a movie Mom and Dad were to object, and the teenage lovers were actually to obey them, the audience would blister the screen with jeers. So, as the-parents-of-the-girl convention faded along with arranged marriages, resourceful writers unearthed a new and amazing array of forces that oppose love. In THE GRADUATE the Blocking Characters were the conventional parents of the girl but for a very

unconventional reason. In WITNESS the force that opposes love is her culture—she’s Amish, virtually from another world. In MRS. SOFFEL, Mel Gibson plays an imprisoned murderer condemned to hang and Diane Keaton is the wife of the prison’s warden. What is to stop them? All members of “right-thinking” society. In WHEN HARRY MET SALLY, the lovers suffer from the absurd belief that friendship and love are incompatible. In LONE STAR, the blocking force is racism; in THE CRYING GAME, sexual identity; in GHOST, death. The enthusiasm for romance that opened this century has turned at its close to deep malaise that brings with it a dark, skeptical attitude toward love. In response, we’ve seen the rise and surprising popularity of dow...

and their love is “star-crossed.” These films speak to a growing sense of the hopelessness, if not imp...

The lesson is this: Social attitudes change. The cultural antenna of the writer must be alert to these movements or risk writing an antique. For example: In FALLING IN LOVE the force that opposes love is that the lovers are each married to someone else. The only tears in the audience came from yawning too hard. One could almost hear their thoughts screaming, “What’s your problem? You’re married to stiffs. Dump them. Does the word ‘divorce’ mean anything to you people?” Through the 1950s, however, a love affair across marriages was seen as a painful betrayal. Many poignant films—STRANGERS WHEN WE MEET, BRIEF ENCOUNTER—drew their energy from society’s antagonism to adultery. But by the 1980s attitudes had shifted, giving rise to the feeling that romance is so precious and life so short, if two married people want to have an affair, let them. Right or wrong, that was the temperament of the time, so that a film with antiquated 1950s values brutally bored the 1980s audience. The

audience wants to know how it feels to be alive on the knife edge of the now. What does it mean to be a human being today?

Each genre involves crucial human values: love/hate, peace/war, justice/injustice, achievement/failure, good/evil, and the like.

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. Hemingway, for example, was fascinated with the question of how to face death. After he witnessed the suicide of his father, it became the central theme, not only of his writing, but of his life. He chased death in war, in sport, on safari, until finally, putting a shotgun in his mouth, he found it. Charles Dickens, whose father was imprisoned for debt, wrote of the lonely child searching for the lost father over and over in David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Great Expectations. Molière turned a critical eye on the idiocy and depravity of seventeenth-century France and made a career writing plays whose titles read like a checklist of human vices: The Miser, The Misanthrope, The Hypochondriac. Each of these authors

found his subject and it sustained him over the long journey of the writer.

for of all the reasons for wanting to write, the only one that nurtures us through time is love of the work itself.

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.

choice under pressure will strip away the mask of characterization, we’ll peer into their inner natures and with a flash of insight grasp their true characters. CHARACTER REVELATION The revelation of true character in contrast or

contradiction to characterization is fundamental to all fine storytelling. Life teaches this grand principle: What seems is not what is.

If we’re introduced to a character whose demeanor is “loving husband,” and by the end of the tale he’s still what he first appeared to be, a loving husband with no secrets, no unfulfilled dreams, no hidden passions, we’ll be very disappointed. When characterization and true character match, when inner life and outer appearance are, like a block of cement, of one substance, the role becomes a list of repetitious, predictable behaviors. It’s not as if such a character isn’t credible. Shallow, nondimensional people exist… but they are boring.

The revelation of deep character in contrast or contradiction to characterization is fundamental in major characters. Minor roles may or may not need hidden dimensions, but principals must be written in depth—they cannot be at heart what they seem to be at face. CHARACTER ARC Taking the principle further yet: 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.

First, the story lays out the protagonist’s characterization:

Second, we’re soon led into the heart of the character. His true nature is revealed as he chooses to take one action over another:

Third, this deep nature is at odds with the outer countenance of the character, contrasting with it, if not contradicting it. We sense that he is not what he appears to be.

Fourth, having exposed the character’s inner nature, the story puts greater and greater pressure on him to make more and more difficult choices:

Fifth, by the climax of the story, these choices have profoundly changed the humanity of the character:

STRUCTURE AND CHARACTER FUNCTIONS 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. Structure and character are interlocked. The event structure of a story is created out of the choices that characters make under pressure and the actions they choose to take, while characters are the creatures who are revealed and changed by how they choose to act under pressure. If you

change one, you change the other. If you change event design, you have also changed character; if you change deep character, you must reinvent the structure...

the first commandment of all temporal art is: Thou shalt save the best for last.

The vast majority of this work, 75 percent or more of our struggles, goes into designing the interlock of deep character to the invention and arrangement of events. The writing of dialogue and description consumes what’s left. And of the overwhelming effort that goes into designing story, 75 percent of that is focused on creating the climax of the last act. The story’s ultimate event is the writer’s ultimate task.

If, to some people, a writer’s final statement about life appears dogmatic and opinionated, so be it. Bland and pacifying writers are a bore. We want unfettered souls with the courage to take a point of view, artists whose insights startle and excite.

The problem is not to start writing, but to keep writing and renewing inspiration. We rarely know where we’re going; writing is discovery.

For an artist must have not only ideas to express, but ideas to prove. Expressing an idea, in the sense of exposing it, is never enough. The audience must not just understand; it must believe. You want the world to leave your story convinced that yours is a truthful metaphor for life.

As you create your story, you create your proof;

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. Master storytellers never explain. They do the hard, painfully creative thing—they dramatize.