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

by Robert McKee

When we peek behind the grinning mask of

comic cynicism, we find a frustrated idealist. The comic sensibility wants the world to be perfect, but when it looks around, it finds greed, corruption, lunacy. The result is an angry and depressed artist. If you doubt that, ask one over for dinner. Every host in Hollywood has made that mistake: “Let’s invite some comedy writers to the party! That’ll brighten things up.” Sure… till the paramedics arrive. These angry idealists, however, know that if they lecture the world about what a rotten place it is, no one will listen. But if they trivialize the exalted, pull the trousers down on snobbery, if they expose society for its...

Comedy is at heart an

angry, antisocial art. To solve the problem of weak comedy, therefore, the writer first asks: What am I angry about? He finds that aspect of society that heats his blood and goes on an assault.

The incisive difference between comedy and drama is this: Both turn scenes with surprise and insight, but in comedy, when the Gap cracks open, the surprise explodes the great belly laughs

You know you’ve written a true comedy when you sit an innocent victim down and pitch your story. Just tell him what happens, without quoting witty dialogue or sight gags, and he laughs. Every time you turn the scene, he laughs; turn it again and he laughs again; turn, laugh, until by the end of the pitch you have him collapsed on the floor. That’s a Comedy. If you pitch your story and people don’t laugh, you’ve not written a Comedy. You’ve written… something else. The solution, however, is not found in trying to devise clever lines or pie in the face. Gags come naturally when the comic structure calls for them. Instead, concentrate on Turning Points. For each action first ask, “What’s the opposite of that?” then take it a step farther to “What’s off-the-wall

the-wall from that?” Spring gaps of comic surprise—write a funny story.

Four, take a neutral POV. Imagine them, as a comedy writer might, at a distance and in profile. This first encourages us to empathize with Jack, the second asks empathy for Tony, the third draws us close to both, the fourth with neither and prompts us to laugh at them.

The more time spent with a character, the more opportunity to witness his choices. The result is more empathy and emotional involvement between audience and character.

TRUE CHARACTER can only be expressed through choice in dilemma. How the person chooses to act under pressure is who he is—the greater the pressure, the truer and deeper the choice to character.

Ask: What does this character want? Now? Soon? Overall? Knowingly? Unknowingly? With

clear, true answers comes your command of the role.

Dimension means contradiction: either within deep character (guilt-ridden ambition) or between characterization and deep character (a charming thief).

the protagonist must be the most dimensional character in the cast to focus empathy on the star role. If not, the Center of Good decenters; the fictional universe flies apart; the audience loses balance.

Cast Design

In essence, the protagonist creates the rest of the cast. All other characters are in a story first and foremost because of the relationship they strike to the protagonist and the way each helps to delineate the dimensions of the protagonist’s complex nature. Imagine a cast as a kind of solar system with the protagonist as the sun, supporting roles as planets around the sun, bit players as satellites around the planets—all held in orbit by the gravitational pull of the star at the center, each pulling at the tides of the others’ natures. Consider this hypothetical protagonist: He’s amusing and optimistic, then morose and cynical; he’s compassionate, then cruel; fearless, then fearful. This four-dimensional role needs a cast around him to delineate his contradictions, characters toward whom he can act and react in different ways at different times and places. These supporting characters must round him out so that his complexity is both consistent and credible.

comic character is created by assigning the role a “humour,” an obsession the character does not see.

We borrow bits and pieces of humanity, raw chunks of imagination and observation from wherever they’re found, assemble them into dimensions of contradiction, then round them into the creatures we call characters.

The periodic sentence is the “suspense sentence.” Its meaning is delayed until the very last word, forcing both actor and audience to listen to the end of the line.

The Silent Screenplay The best advice for writing film dialogue is don’t. Never write a line of dialogue when you can create a visual expression. The first attack on every scene should be: How could I write this in a purely visual way and not have to resort to a single line

of dialogue?

Eliminate “is” and “are” throughout. Onscreen nothing is in a state of being; story life is an unending flux of change, of becoming.

Eliminate “we see” and “we hear.” “We” doesn’t exist.

Master Scene

INT. DINING ROOM—DAY Jack enters and looks around the empty room. Lifting his briefcase above his head, he drops it with a THUMP on the fragile, antique chair next to the door. He listens. Silence.

Pleased with himself, he ambles for the kitchen, when suddenly he’s brought up short. A note with his name on it sits propped against the rose-filled vase on the dinning table. Nervously he twists his wedding ring. Taking a breath, he strolls over, picks up the note, tears it open, and reads.

Regardless of genre,

if a story can’t work in ten minutes, how will it work in 110 minutes? It won’t get better when it gets bigger. Everything that’s wrong with it in a ten-minute pitch is ten times worse onscreen. Until a good majority of listeners respond with enthusiasm, there’s no point going forward. “With enthusiasm” doesn’t mean people leap up and kiss you on both cheeks, rather they whisper “Wow” and fall silent. A fine work of art—music, dance, painting, story—has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place. When a story, pitched from a step-outline, is so strong it brings silence—no comments, no criticism, just a look of pleasure—that’s a hell of a thing and time is too precious to waste on a story that hasn’t that power. Now the writer’s ready to move to the next stage—the treatment.

Trea...

To “treat” the step-outline, the writer expands each scene from its one or two sentences to a paragraph or more of double-spaced, presen...

In treatment the writer indicates what characters talk about—“he wants her to do this, but she refuses,” for example—but never writes dialogue. Instead, he creates the subtext—the true thoughts and feelings underneath what is said and done. We may think we know what our characters are thinking and feeling, but we don’t know we know until we write it down:

SCREENPLAY Writing a screenplay from a thorough treatment is a joy and often runs at a clip of five to ten pages per day. We now convert treatment description to screen description and add dialogue. And dialogue written at this point is invariably the finest dialogue we’ve ever written. Our characters have had tape over their mouths for so long, they can’t wait to talk, and unlike so many films in which all characters speak with the same vocabulary and style, dialogue written after in-depth preparation creates character-specific voices. They don’t all sound like one another and they don’t all sound like the writer.

Writing from the outside in—writing dialogue in search of scenes, writing scenes in search of story—is the least creative method.

Aristotle’s Poetics. Translation and commentary by Stephen Halliwell. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 2d ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972.