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

by Robert McKee

Start from the opening beat and review the gerund phrases describing the actions of the characters. As you trace action/reaction to the end of the scene, a shape or pattern should emerge. In a well-designed scene, even behaviors that seem helter-skelter will have an arc and a purpose. In fact, in such scenes, it’s their careful design that makes the beats feel random. Within the arc locate the moment when the major gap opens between expectation and result, turning the scene to its changed end va...

These two people have a relationship. Each feels like the injured party, and each knows the sensitivity of the other so well that they hurt each other with ease.

because of his own incapacity for authentic emotion, he’s hungry for the life experiences of others to fill the pages of his novels.

The Inciting Incident is the story’s most profound cause, and, therefore, the final effect, the Story Climax, should seem inevitable. The cement that binds them is the Spine,

the protagonist’s deep desire to restore the balance of life.

On one hand, we desire serenity, harmony, peace, and relaxation, but too much of this day after day and we become bored to the point of ennui and need therapy. As a result, we also desire challenge, tension,

danger, even fear. But too much of this day after day and again we end up in the rubber room. So the rhythm of life swings between these poles.

This alternation between tension and relaxation is the pulse of living, the rhythm of days, even years.

We use our act structure to start at a base of tension, then rise scene by sequence to the Climax of Act One. As we enter Act Two, we compose scenes that reduce this tension, switching to comedy, romance, a counterpointing mood that lowers the Act One intensity so that the audience can catch its breath and reach for more energy.

After retarding pace, we build the progressions of the following act until we top the previous

Climax in intensity and meaning. Act by act, we tighten and release tension until the final Climax empties out the audience, leaving it emotionally exhausted but fulfilled. Then a brief Resolution scene to recuperate before going home.

It’s just like sex. Masters of the bedroom arts pace their love-making. They begin by taking each other to a state of delicious tension short of—and we use the same word in both cases—climax, then tell a joke and shift positions before building each other to an even higher tension short of climax; then have a sandwich, watch TV, and gather energy to then reach greater and greater intensity, making love in cycles of rising tension until they finally climax simultaneously and the earth moves and ...

SOCIAL PROGRESSION Widen the impact of character actions into society.

This principle of starting with intimate problems that ramify outward into the world to build powerful progressions explains why certain professions are overrepresented in the roles of protagonists. This is why we tend to tell stories

about lawyers, doctors, warriors, politicians, scientists—people so positioned in society by profession that if something goes haywire in their private lives, the writer can expand the action into society.

PERSONAL PROGRESSION

Drive actions deeply into the intimate relationships and inner lives of the characters. If the logic of your setting doesn’t allow you to go wide, then you must go deep. Start with a personal or inner conflict that demands balancing, yet seems relatively solvable. Then, as the work progresses, hammer the story downward—emotionally, psychologically, physically, morally—to the dark secrets, the unspoken truths that hide behind a public mask.

SYMBOLIC ASCENSION

Build the symbolic charge of the story’s imagery from the particular to the universal, the specific to the archetypal. A good story well told fosters a good film. But a good story well told with the added power of subliminal symbolism lifts the telling to the next level of expressivity, and the payoff may be a great film. Symbolism is very compelling. Like images in our dreams, it invades the unconscious mind and touches us deeply—as long as we’re unaware of its presence. If, in a heavy-handed way, we label images as “symbolic,” their effect is destroyed. But if they are slipped quietly, gradually, and unassumingly into the telling, they move us profoundly. Symbolic progression works in this way: start with actions, locations, and roles that represent only themselves. But as the story progresses, chose images that gather greater and greater

meaning, until by the end of the telling characters, settings, and events stand for universal ideas.

IRONIC ASCENSION Turn progression on irony. Turn progression on irony. Irony is the subtlest manifestation of story pleasure, that delicious sense of “Ah, life is just like that.” It sees life in duality; it plays with our paradoxical existence, aware of the bottomless chasm between what seems and what is. Verbal irony is found in the discrepancy between words and their meanings—a primary source of jokes. But in story, irony plays between actions and results—the primary source of story energy, between appearance and reality—

the primary source of truth and emotion. An ironic sensibility is a precious asset, a razor to cut to the truth, but it can’t be used directly. It does us no good to have a character wander the story saying, “How ironic!” Like symbolism, to point at irony destroys it. Irony must be coolly, casually released with a seemingly innocent unawareness of the effect it’s creating and a faith that the audience will get it.

1. He gets at last what he’s always wanted… but too late to have it.

2. He’s pushed further and further from his goal… only to discover that in fact he’s been led right to it.

3. He throws away what he later finds is indispensable to his happiness.

4. To reach a goal he unwittingly takes the precise steps necessary to lead him away.

5. The action he takes to destroy something

becomes exactly what are needed to be destroyed by it.

6. He comes into possession of something he’s certain will make him miserable, does everything possible to get rid of it… only to discover it’s the gift of happiness.

They think life is A, B, C, D, E. That’s just when life likes to turn you around, kick you in the butt, and grin: “Not today, my friend. Today it’s E, D, C, B, A. Sorry.”

PRINCIPLE OF TRANSITION

An imaginative study of almost any two scenes will find a link.

CRISIS

The protagonist’s quest has carried him through the Progressive Complications until he’s exhausted all actions to achieve his desire, save one. He now finds himself at the end of the line. His next action is his last. No tomorrow. No second chance.

The Crisis is the story’s Obligatory Scene. From the Inciting Incident on, the audience has been anticipating with growing vividness the scene in which the protagonist will be face to face with the most focused, powerful forces of antagonism in his existence. This is the dragon, so to speak, that guards the Object of Desire:

This dilemma confronts the protagonist who, when face-to-face with the most powerful and focused forces of antagonism in his life, must make a decision to take one action or another in a last effort to achieve his Object of Desire. How the protagonist chooses here gives us the most penetrating view of his deep character, the ultimate expression of his humanity. This scene reveals the story’s most important value. If there’s been any doubt about which value is central, as the protagonist makes the Crisis Decision, the primary value comes to the fore.

At Crisis the protagonist’s willpower is most severely tested. As we know from life, decisions are far more difficult to make than actions are to take. We often put off doing something for as long as possible, then as we finally make the decision and step into the action, we’re surprised by its relative ease. We’re left to wonder why we dreaded doing it until we realize that most of life’s actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.

Generally, Crisis and Climax happen in the last minutes and in the same scene.

IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES: Inciting Incident: Lovers meet within the first ten minutes and decide to abandon society and normalcy for a life of sexual obsession. The remaining hundred minutes are devoted to sexual experimentations that eventually lead to death.

The great risk of placing the Crisis on the heels of the Inciting Incident is repetitiousness. Whether it’s high-budget action repeating patterns of chase/fight, chase/fight, or low-budget

repetitions of drinking/drinking/drinking or lovemaking/lovemaking/ lovemaking, the problems of variety and progression are staggering. Yet mastery of this task may produ...

An emotional momentum has built to this point, but the Crisis dams its flow. As the protagonist goes through this decision, the audience leans in, wondering: “What’s he going to do? What’s he going to do?” Tension builds and builds, then as the protagonist makes a choice of action, that compressed energy explodes into the Climax.

CLIMAX Story Climax is the fourth of the five-part structure. This crowning Major Reversal is not necessarily full of noise and violence. Rather, it must be full of meaning. If I could send a telegram to the film producers of the world, it would be these three words: “Meaning Produces Emotion.” Not money; not sex; not special effects; not movie stars; not lush photography. MEANING: A revolution in values from positive to negative or negative to positive with or without irony—a value swing at maximum charge that’s absolute and irreversible. The meaning of that change moves the heart of the audience. The action that creates this change must be

“pure,” clear, and self-evident, requiring no explanation. Dialogue or narration to spell it out is boring and redundant.

The Climax of the last act is your great imaginative leap. Without it, you have no story. Until you

have it, your characters wait like suffering patients praying for a cure. Once the Climax is in hand, stories are in a significant way rewritten backward, not forward. The flow of life moves from cause to effect, but the flow of creativity often flows from effect to cause. An idea for the Climax pops unsupported into the imagination. Now we must work backward to support it in the fictional reality, supplying the hows and whys. We work back from the ending to make certain that by Idea and Counter-Idea every image, beat, action, or line of dialogue somehow relates to or sets up this grand payoff. All scenes must be thematically or structurally justified in the light of the Climax. If they can be cut without disturbing the impact of the ending, they must be cut.

If logic allows, climax subplots within the Central Plot’s Climax. This is a wonderful effect; one final action by th...

If this multiplying effect is impossible, the least important subplots are best climaxed earliest, followed by the next most important, building overall to Climax of the Central Plot.

William Goldman argues that the key to all story endings is to give the audience what it wants, but not the way it expects.

Many producers state without blinking that the audience wants a happy ending. They say this because up-ending films tend to make more money than down-ending films. The reason for this is that a small percentage of the audience won’t go to any film that might give it an unpleasant e...