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

by Robert McKee

A CONTROLLING IDEA may be expressed in a single sentence describing how and why life undergoes change from one condition of existence at the beginning to another at the end.

Cause refers to the primary reason that the life or world of the protagonist has turned to its positive or negative value. Working back from the ending to the beginning, we trace the chief cause deep

within the character, society, or environment that has brought this value into existence. A complex story may contain many forces for change, but generally one cause dominates the others. Therefore, in a Crime Story, neither “Crime doesn’t pay …” (justice triumphs …) nor “Crime pays …” (injustice triumphs …) could stand as a full Controlling Idea because each gives us only half a meaning—the ending value. A story of substance also expresses why its world or protagonist has ended on its specific value.

To complete the previous examples: IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT—justice is restored because a perceptive black outsider sees the truth of white perversion. GROUNDHOG DAY—happiness fills

our lives when we learn to love unconditionally. MISSING—tyranny prevails because it’s supported by a corrupt CIA. DANGEROUS LIAISONS—hatred destroys us when we fear the opposite sex. The Controlling Idea is the purest form of a story’s meaning, the how and why of change, the vision of life the audience members carry away into their lives.

Meaning and the Creative Process How do you find your story’s Controlling Idea? The creative process may begin anywhere. You might be prompted by a Premise, a “What would happen if…,” or a bit of character, or an image. You might start in the middle, the beginning, near the end. As your fictional world and characters grow...

the leap and create the Story Climax. This climax of the last act is a final action that excites and moves you, that feels complete and satisfying. The Controlling Idea is now at hand. Looking at your ending, ask: As a result of this climatic action, what value, positively or negatively charged, is brought into the world of my protagonist? Next, tracing backward from this climax, digging to the bedrock, ask: What is the chief cause, force, or means by which this value is brought into his world? The sentence you compose from the answers to those two questions becomes your Controlling Idea. In other words, the story tells you its meaning; you do not dictate meaning to the story. You do not draw action from idea, rather idea from action. For no matter your inspiration, ulti...

Recognition: The Story Climax mirrors your inner self, and if your story is from the very best sources within you, more often than not you’ll be ...

PROGRESSIONS build by moving dynamically between the positive and negative charges of the values at stake in the story.

From the moment of inspiration you reach into your fictional world in search of a design. You have to build a bridge of story from the opening to the ending, a progression of events that spans from Premise to Controlling Idea. These events echo the contradictory voices of one theme. Sequence by sequence, often scene by scene, the positive Idea and its negative Counter-Idea argue, so to speak, back and forth, creating a dramatized dialectical debate. At climax one of these two voices wins and becomes the story’s Controlling Idea.

The positive and negative assertions of the same idea contest back and forth through the film,

building in intensity, until at Crisis they collide head-on in a last impasse. Out of this rises the Story Climax, in which one or the other idea succeeds. This may be the positive Idea: “Justice triumphs because the protagonist is tenaciously resourceful and courageous” (BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK, SPEED, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS), or the negative Counter-Idea: “Injustice prevails because the antagonist is overwhelmingly ruthless and powerful” (SEVEN, Q & A, CHINATOWN). Whichever of the two is dramatized in the final climatic action becomes the Controlling Idea of Value plus Cause, the purest statement of the story’s conclusive and decisive meaning.

Didacticism results from the naive enthusiasm that fiction can be used like a scalpel to cut out the cancers of society.

This does not mean that starting with an idea is certain to produce didactic work… but that’s the risk. As a story develops, you must willingly entertain opposite, even repugnant ideas. The finest writers have dialectical, flexible minds that easily shift points of view. They see the positive, the negative, and all shades of irony, seeking the truth of these views honestly and convincingly. This omniscience forces them to become even more creative, more imaginative, and more insightful. Ultimately, they express what they deeply believe, but not until they have allowed themselves

to weigh each living issue and experience all its possibilities.

For the proof of your vision is not how well you can assert your Controlling Idea, but its victory over the enormously powerful forces that you array against it.

A great work is a living metaphor that says, “Life is like this.” The classics, down through the ages, give us not solutions but lucidity, not answers but

poetic candor; they make inescapably clear the problems all generations must solve to be human.

good and evil are equal parts of human nature, evil vanquishes good as often as

good conquers evil. We’re both angel and devil. If our natures leaned just slightly toward one or the other, all social dilemmas would have been solved centuries ago. But we’re so divided, we never know from day to day which we’ll be. One day we build the Cathedral of Notre Dame; the next, Auschwitz.

“Love is both pleasure and pain, a poignant anguish, a tender cruelty we pursue because without it life has no meaning,”

The compulsive pursuit of contemporary values—success, fortune, fame, sex, power—will destroy you, but if you see this truth in time and throw away your obsession, you can redeem yourself.

Redemption Plots, in which protagonists pursue values that were once esteemed—money, reknown, career, love, winning, success—but with a compulsiveness, a blindness that carries them to the brink of self-destruction. They stand to lose, if not their lives, their humanity. They manage, however, to glimpse the ruinous nature of their obsession, stop before they go over the edge, then throw away what they once cherished. This pattern gives rise to an ending rich in irony: At climax the protagonist sacrifices his dream (positive), a value that has become a soul-corrupting fixation (negative), to gain an honest, sane, balanced life (positive).

As these titles indicate, this idea has been a magnet for Oscars. In terms of technique, the execution of the climactic action in these films is fascinating. Historically, a positive ending is a scene in which the protagonist takes an action that gets him what he wants. Yet in all the works cited above, the protagonist either refuses to act on his obsession or throws away what he once desired. He or she wins by “losing.” Like solving the Zen riddle of the sound of one hand clapping, the writer’s problem in each case was how to make a nonaction or negative action feel positive.

the depth of joy you experience is in direct proportion to the pain you’re willing to bear.

Second, the negative irony: If you cling to your obsession, your ruthless pursuit will achieve your desire, then destroy you. WALL STREET; CASINO; THE WAR OF THE ROSES; STAR ’80; NASHVILLE; NETWORK; THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY?—these films are the Punitive Plot counterpart to the Redemption Plots above. In them the “down-ending” Counter-Idea becomes the Controlling Idea as protagonists remain steadfastly driven by their need to achieve fame or success, and never think to abandon it. At Story Climax the protagonists achieve their desire (positive), only to be destroyed by it (negative).

On Irony The effect of irony on an audience is that wonderful reaction, “Ah, life is just like that.” We recognize that idealism and pessimism are at the extremes of experience, that life is rarely all sunshine and strawberries, nor is it all doom and drek; it is both. From the worst of experiences something positive can be gained; for the richest of experiences a great price must be paid. No matter how we try to plot a straight passage through life, we sail on the tides of irony. Reality is relentlessly ironic, and this is why stories that end in

irony tend to last the longest through time, travel the widest in the world, and draw the greatest love and respect from audiences.

This is also why, of the three possible emotional charges at climax, irony is by far the most difficult to write. It demands the deepest wisdom and the highest craft for three reasons. First, it’s tough enough to come up with either a bright, idealistic ending or a sober, pessimistic climax that’s satisfying and convincing. But an ironic climax is a single action that makes both a positive and a negative statement. How to do two in one? Second, how to say both clearly? Irony doesn’t mean ambiguity. Ambiguity is a blur; one thing cannot be distinguished from another. But there’s nothing ambiguous about irony; it’s a clear, double declaration of...

not, are meaningless, not ironic. Third, if at climax the life situation of the protagonist is both positive and negative, how to express it so that the two charges remain separated in the audience’s experience and d...

MEANING AND SOCIETY Once you discover your Controlling Idea, respect it. Never allow yourself the luxury of thin...

In 388 B.C. Plato urged the city fathers of Athens to exile all poets and storytellers. They are a threat to society, he argued. Writers deal with ideas, but not in the open, rational manner of philosophers. Instead, they conceal their ideas inside the seductive emotions of art. Yet felt ideas, as Plato pointed out, are ideas nonetheless. Every effective story sends a charged idea out to us, in effect compelling the idea into us, so that we must believe. In fact, the persuasive power of a story is so great that we may believe its meaning even if we find it morally repellent. Storytellers, Plato insisted, are dangerous people. He was right.

If everyone is given a voice, even the irrationally radical or cruelly reactionary, humanity will sort through all possibilities and make the right choice. No civilization, including Plato’s, has ever been destroyed because its citizens learned too much truth. Authoritative personalities, like Plato, fear the threat that comes not from idea, but from emotion. Those in power never want us to feel. Thought can be controlled and manipulated, but emotion is willful and unpredictable. Artists threaten authority by exposing lies and inspiring passion for change. This is why when tyrants seize power, their firing squads aim at the heart of the writer.

Lastly, given story’s power to influence, we need to look at the issue of an artist’s social responsibility. I believe we have no responsibility to cure social ills or renew faith in humanity, to uplift the spirits of society or even express our inner

being. We have only one responsibility: to tell the truth. Therefore, study your Story Climax and extract from it your Controlling Idea. But before you take another step, ask yourself this question: Is this the truth? Do I believe in the meaning of my story? If the answer is no, toss it and start again. If yes, do everything possible to get your work into the world. For although an artist may, in his private life, lie to others, even to himself, when he create...

When you think about it, going to the movies is bizarre. Hundreds of strangers sit in a blackened room, elbow to elbow,

for two or more hours. They don’t go to the toilet or get a smoke. Instead, they stare wide-eyed at a screen, investing more uninterrupted concentration than they give to work, paying money to suffer emotions they’d do anything to avoid in life.

Anything that can be given a free will and the capacity to desire, take action, and suffer the consequences can be a protagonist.

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.

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

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

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. No one believes he doesn’t have even the smallest chance of fulfilling his wishes. But if we were to pull the camera back on life, the grand overview might lead us to conclude that, in the words of Henry David Thoreau, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” that most people waste their precious time and die with the feeling they’ve fallen short of their dreams. As honest as this painful insight may be, we cannot allow ourselves to believe it. Instead, we carry hope to the end. Hope, after all, is not unreasonable. It’s simply hypothetical. “If this… if that… if I learn more…

if I love more… if I discipline myself… if I win the lottery… if things change, then I’ll have a chance of getting from life what I want.” We all carry hope in our hearts, no matter the odds against us. A protagonist, therefore, who’s literally hopeless, who hasn’t even the minimal capacity to achieve his desire, cannot interest us.

The audience, therefore, expects the storyteller to be an artist of vision who can take his story to those distant depths and ranges. 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 takes us to this limit. He must have it within himself to pursue his desire to the boundaries of human experience in depth, breadth, or both, to reach absolute and irreversible change. This, by the way, doesn’t mean your film can’t have a sequel; your protagonist may have more tales to tell. It means that each story must find closure for itself.

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

An audience may, if so moved, empathize with every character in your film, but it must empathize with your protagonist. If not, the audience/story bond is broken.

The audience identifies with deep character, with innate qualities revealed through choice under pressure.