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

by Robert McKee

Additionally, if the protagonists of the Central Plot and subplot are not the same character, care must be taken not to draw too much empathy to the subplot’s protagonist.

To deemphasize a subplot, some of its elements—Inciting Incident, act climaxes, Crisis, Climax, or Resolution—may be kept offscreen.

If a subplot doesn’t thematically contradict or

resonate the Controlling Idea of the main plot, if it doesn’t set up the introduction of the main plot’s Inciting Incident, or complicate the action on the main plot, if it merely runs alongside, it will split the story down the middle and destroy its effect. The audience understands the principle of aesthetic unity. It knows that every story element is there because of the relationship it strikes to every other element. This relationship, structural or thematic, holds the work together. If the audience can’t find it, it’ll disengage from the story and consciously try to force a unity. When this fails, it sits in confusion.

The screenwriting is the art of making the mental physical. We create visual correlatives for inner conflict—not dialogue or narration to describe ideas and emotions, but images of character choice and action to indirectly and ineffably express the thoughts and feelings within. Therefore, the interior life a novel must be reinvented for the screen.

You’re free to break or bend convention, but for one reason only: to put something more important in its place.

scene is unified around desire, action, conflict, and change. In each scene a character pursues a desire related to his immediate time and place. But this Scene-Objective must be an aspect of his Super-Objective or Spine, the story-long quest that spans from Inciting Incident to Story Climax. Within the scene, the character acts on his Scene-Objective by choosing under pressure to take one action or another. However, from any or all levels of conflict comes a reaction he didn’t anticipate. The effect is to crack open the gap between expectation and

result, turning his outer fortunes, inner life, or both from the positive to the negative or the negative to the positive in terms of values the audience understands are at risk. A scene causes change in a minor, albeit significant way. A Sequence Climax is a scene that causes a moderate reversal— change with more impact than a scene. An Act Climax is a scene that causes a major reversal—change with greater impact than Sequence Climax. Accordingly, we never write a scene that’s merely a flat, static display of exposition; rather we strive for this ideal: to create a story design in which every scene is a minor, moderate, or major Turning Point.

The effects of Turning Points are fourfold: surprise, increased curiosity, insight, and new direction. When a gap opens between expectation and result, it jolts the audience with surprise. The world has reacted in a way neither character nor audience had foreseen. This moment of shock instantly provokes curiosity as the audience wonders “Why?” TRADING PLACES: Why are these two old men saving this beggar from the police? WALL STREET: Why is Gekko saying: “Tell me something I don’t know.” In an effort to satisfy its curiosity, the audience rushes back through what story it’s seen so far, seeking answers. In a beautifully designed story, these answers have been quietly but carefully layered in.

New direction: the corkscrew twists of Act Three.

The storyteller leads us into expectation, makes us think we understand, then cracks open reality,

creating surprise and curiosity, sending us back through his story again and again. On each trip back, we gain deeper and deeper insight into the natures of his characters and their world—a sudden awareness of the ineffable truths that lie hidden beneath the film’s images. He then takes his story in a new direction in an ever-escalating progression of such moments.

To tell story is to make a promise: If you give me your concentration, I’ll give you surprise followed by the pleasure of discovering life, its pains and joys, at levels and in directions you have never imagined. And most important, this must be done with such seeming ease and naturalness that we lead the audience to these discoveries as if spontaneously. The effect of a beautifully turned moment is that filmgoers experience a rush of knowledge as if they did it for themselves. In a sense they did. Insight i...

Imagine now the difficulties of designing a story so that thirty, forty, fifty times over, scenes turn in minor, moderate, or major ways, each expressing an aspect of our vision. This is why weak storytelling resorts to substituting information for insight. Why many writers choose to explain their meanings out of the mouths of their characters, or worse, in voice-over narration. Such writing is always inadequate. It forces characters to a phony, self-conscious knowledge rarely found in actuality. More important, even exquisite, perceptive prose cannot substitute for the global insight that floods the mind when we match our life experiences against an artist’s well-placed setup.

Setups must be handled with great care. They must be planted in such a way that when the audience first sees them, they have one meaning, but with a rush of insight, they take on a second, more important meaning.

The juggling act of setting up, paying off, setting up again and paying off again often sparks our most creative flashes.

You’ve found your story because you’ve allowed yourself to think the unthinkable. In storytelling, logic is retroactive. In story, unlike life, you can always go back and fix it. You can set up what may seem absurd and make it rational. Reasoning is secondary and postcreativity. Primary and preconditional to everything else is imagination—the willingness to think any crazy idea, to let images that may or may not make sense find their way to you. Nine out of ten will be useless. Yet one illogical idea may put butterflies in your belly, a flutter that’s telling you something wonderful is hidden in this mad notion. In an intuitive flash you see the

connection and realize you can go back and make it make sense. Logic is child’s play. Imagination takes you to the screen.

we render the precise experience necessary to cause an emotion, then take the audience through that experience. For Turning Points not only deliver insight, they create the dynamics of emotion.

there are only two emotions—pleasure and pain.

As audience, we experience an emotion when the telling takes us through a transition of values. First, we must empathize with the character. Second, we must know what the character wants and want the character to have it. Third, we must understand the values at stake in the character’s life. Within these conditions, a change in values moves our emotions.

An emotion is a relatively short-term, energetic experience that peaks and burns and is over.

The Law of Diminishing Returns, true in life as well as in story, is this: The more often we experience something, the less effect it has.

The choice between good and evil or between right and wrong is no choice at all.

True choice is dilemma. It occurs in two situations. First, a choice between irreconcilable goods: From the character’s view two things are desirable, he wants both, but circumstances are forcing him to choose only one. Second, a choice between the lesser of two evils: From the character’s view two things are undesirable, he wants neither, but circumstances are forcing him to choose one. How a character chooses in a true dilemma is a powerful expression of his humanity and of the world in which he lives.

For the problem won’t be in the scene’s activity but in its action; not in how characters are talking or behaving on the surface, but in what they’re doing behind their masks. Beats build scenes, and the flaws of an ill-designed scene are in these exchanges of behavior.

Nothing is what it seems. This principle calls for

the screen-writer’s constant awareness of the duplicity of life, his recognition that everything exists on at least two levels, and that, therefore, he must write a simultaneous duality: First, he must create a verbal description of the sensory surface of life, sight and sound, activity and talk. Second, he must create the inner world of conscious and unconscious desire, action and reaction, impulse and id, genetic and experiential imperatives. As in reality, so in fiction: He must veil the truth with a living mask, the actual thoughts and feelings of characters behind their saying and doing. An old Hollywood expression goes: “If the scene is about what the scene is about, you’re in deep shit.”

The storyteller gives us the pleasure that life denies, the pleasure of sitting in the dark ritual of story, looking through the face of life to the heart of what is felt and thought beneath what’s said and done.

we’ll know what’s happening because it’s in the unspoken thoughts and emotions of the actors. As we see through the surface, we’ll lean back with a knowing smile: “Look what happened.

They’re not just changing the tire on a car. He thinks she’s hot and she knows it. Boy has met girl.” In other words, write as these things happen in life.

This principle does not mean that people are insincere. It’s a commonsense recognition that we all wear a public mask. We say and do what we feel we should, while we think and feel something

else altogether. As we must. We realize we can’t go around saying and doing what we’re actually thinking and feeling. If we all did that, life would be a lunatic asylum. Indeed, that’s how you know you’re talking to a lunatic. Lunatics are those poor souls who have lost their inner communication and so they allow themselves to say and do exactly what they are thinking and feeling and that’s why they’re mad.

Nor does this mean that we can’t write powerful dialogue in which desperate people try to tell the truth. It simply means that the most passionate moments must conceal an even deeper level. CHINATOWN: Evelyn Mulwray cries out: “She’s my sister and my daughter. My father and I…” But what she doesn’t say is: “Please help me.” Her anguished confession is in fact a plea for help. Subtext: “I didn’t kill my husband; my father did… to possess my child. If you arrest me, he’ll take her. Please help me.” In the next beat Gittes says, “We’ll have to get you out of town.” An illogical reply that makes perfect sense. Subtext: “I’ve understood everything you’ve told me. I now know your father did it. I love you and I’m going to risk my life to save you and your child. Then I’m

going after the bastard.” All this is underneath the scene, giving us truthful behavior without phony “on the nose” dialogue, and what’s more, without robbing the audience of the pleasure of insight.

Characters may say and do anything you can imagine. But because it’s impossible for any human being to tell or act the complete truth, because at the very least there’s always an unconscious dimension, the writer must layer in a subtext. And when the audience senses that subtext, the scene plays.

This principle also extends to the first-person novel, theatrical soliloquy, and direct-to-camera or voice-over narration. For if characters talk privately to us, that doesn’t mean for a moment that they know the truth or are capable of telling it.

Subtext is present even when a character is alone. For if no one else is watching us, we are. We wear masks to hide our true selves from ourselves.

Not only do individuals wear masks, but institutions do as well and hire public relations experts to keep them in place. Paddy Chayefsky’s satire HOSPITAL cuts to the core of that truth. Hospital staffs all wear white and act as if professional, caring, and scientific. But if you’ve ever worked

inside a medical institution, you know that greed and ego and a touch of madness are invisibly there. If you...

The constant duality of life is true even for the inanimate. In Robert Rossen’s adaptation of Melville’s BILLY BUDD a man-o-war rests in tropical waters at night. Uncountable stars gleam above, all magnificently reflected in a black, calm sea. A low, full moon trails its light from the horizon to the ship’s prow. The limp sails tremble in the warm breezes. The cruel master-at-arms, Claggart (Robert Ryan) is holding watch. Billy (Terence Stamp) can’t sleep, so he comes out on deck, stands at the gunnels with Claggart, and remarks on what a beautiful evening it is. Clagg...

THE TECHNIQUE OF SCEN...

Step One: Define Conflict First ask, who drives the scene, motivates it, and makes it happen? Any character or force might drive a scene, even an inanimate object or act of nature. Then look into both the text and subtext of this character or force, and ask: What does he (or it) want? Desire is always the key. Phrase this desire (or in the actor’s idiom: scene objective)

as an infinitive: such as, “to do this…” or “to get that…” Next, look across the scene and ask: What forces of antagonism block this desire? Again, these forces may come from any level or combination. After identifying the source of antagonism, ask: What do the forces of antagonism want? This too is best expressed as an infinitive: “Not to do that…” or “To get this instead…” If the scene is well written, when you compare the set of phrases expressing the desires from each side, you’ll see that they’re in direct conflict—not tangential.

Step Two: Note Opening Value Identify the value at stake in the scene and note its charge, positive or negative, at the opening of the scene...

at the negative, a prisoner of his own obsessive ambition.” Or: “Faith. The protagonist is at the positive, he trusts in God...

Step Three: Break the Scene into Beats A beat is an exchange of action/reaction in character behavior. Look carefully at the scene’s first action on two levels: outwardly, in terms of what the character seems to be doing, and, more important, look beneath the surface to what he is actually doing. Name this subtextural action with an active gerund phrase, such as “Begging.” Try to find phrases that not only indicate action but touch the feelings of the character. “Pleading” for e...

The phrases that express the action in the subtext do not describe character activity in literal terms; they go deeper to name the character’s essential action with emotive connotations. Now look across the scene to see what reaction that action brought, and describe that reaction with an active gerund phrase. For example, “Ignoring the plea.” This exchange of action and reaction is a beat. As long as it continues, Character A is “Groveling at her feet” but Character B is “Ignoring the plea,” it’s one beat. Even if their exchange repeats a number of times, it’s still one and the same beat. A new beat doesn’t occur until behavior clearly changes. If, for example, Character A’s groveling changed to “Threatening to leave her” and in reaction Character B’s ignoring changed to “Lau...

Step Four: Note Closing Value and Compare with Opening Value At the end of the scene, examine the value-charged condition of the character’s situation and describe it in positive/negative terms. Compare this note to the one made in Step Two. If the two notations are the same, the activity between them is a nonevent. Nothing has changed, therefore nothing has happened. Exposition may have been passed to the audien...

Step Five: Survey Beats and Locate ...