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

by Robert McKee

Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.

There’s been no conspiracy to keep secret the truths of our art. In the twenty-three centuries since Aristotle wrote The Poetics, the “secrets” of story have been as public as the library down the street.

When talented people write badly it’s generally for one of two reasons: Either they’re blinded by an idea

they feel compelled to prove or they’re driven by an emotion they must express. When talented people write well, it is generally for this reason: They’re moved by a desire to touch the audience.

A story is not only what you have to say but how you say it.

Why is so much of our life spent inside stories? Because as critic Kenneth Burke tells us, stories are equipment for living.

Our appetite for story is a reflection of the profound human need to grasp the patterns of living, not merely as an intellectual exercise, but within a very personal, emotional experience.

as Aristotle observed twenty-three hundred years ago, when storytelling goes bad, the result is decadence.

transudes

The hard-to-believe truth is that what we see on the screen each year is a reasonable reflection of the best writing of the last few years.

Experience, however, is overrated.

Self-knowledge is the key—life plus deep reflection on our reactions to life.

The unschooled writer calls this “instinct,” but it’s merely habit and it’s rigidly limiting.

Of the total creative effort represented in a finished work, 75 percent or more of a writer’s labor goes into designing story. Who are these characters? What do they want? Why do they want it? How do they go about getting it? What stops them? What are the consequences?

The writers of portraiture and spectacle, indeed all writers, must come to understand the relationship of story to life: Story is metaphor for life.

The weakest possible excuse to include anything in a story is: “But it actually happened.”

What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.

Literary and story talent are not only distinctively different but are unrelated, for stories do not need to be written to be told.

You may have the insight of a Buddha, but if you cannot tell story, your ideas turn dry as chalk.

STRUCTURE is a selection of events from the characters’ life stories that is composed into a strategic sequence to arouse specific emotions and to express a specific view of life.

“Event” means change.

STORY VALUES are the universal qualities of human experience that may shift from positive to negative, or negative to positive, from one moment to the next.

Look closely at each scene you’ve written and ask: What value is at stake in my character’s life at this moment? Love? Truth? What?

If the value-charged condition of the character’s life stays unchanged from one end of a scene to the other, nothing meaningful happens.

If exposition is a scene’s sole justification, a disciplined writer will trash it and weave its information into the film elsewhere.

No scene that doesn’t turn. This is our ideal.

A BEAT is an exchange of behavior in action/reaction.

A SEQUENCE is a series of scenes—generally two to five—that culminates with greater impact than any previous scene.

When you look at the value-charged situation in the life of the character at the beginning of the story, then compare it to the value-charge at the end of the story, you should see the arc of the film, the great sweep of change that takes life from one condition at the opening to a changed condition at the end.

This final condition, this end change, must be absolute and irreversible.

To PLOT means to navigate through the dangerous terrain of story and when confronted by a dozen branching possibilities to choose the correct path. Plot is the writer’s choice of events and their design in time.

CLASSICAL DESIGN means a story built around an active protagonist who struggles against primarily external forces of antagonism to pursue his or her desire, through continuous time, within a consistent and causally connected fictional reality, to a closed ending of absolute, irreversible change.

If the audience shrinks, the budget must shrink. This is the law.

You’ll know you understand it when you can do it. The writer works at his skills until knowledge shifts from the left side of the brain to the right, until intellectual awareness becomes living craft.

A story’s SETTING is four-dimensional—Period, Duration, Location, Level of Conflict.

Limitation is vital. The first step toward a well-told story is to create a small, knowable world.

The irony of setting versus story is this: The larger the world, the more diluted the knowledge of the writer, therefore the fewer his creative choices and the more clichéd the story. The smaller the world, the more complete the knowledge of the writer, therefore the greater his creative choices. Result: a fully original story and victory in the war on cliché.

No one has to see your failures unless you add vanity to folly and exhibit them.

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.

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?

“Positioning the audience” means this: We don’t want people coming to our work cold and vague, not knowing what to expect, forcing us to spend the first twenty minutes of screen-time clueing them toward the necessary story attitude.

The principle of Creative Limitation calls for freedom within a circle of obstacles.

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?

Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time.

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

Aristotle approached the question of story and meaning in this way: Why is it, he asked, when we see a dead

body in the street we have one reaction, but when we read of death in Homer, or see it in the theatre, we have another? Because in life idea and emotion come separately.

a story well told gives you the very thing you cannot get from life: meaningful emotional experience. In life, experiences become meaningful with reflection in time. In art, they are meaningful now, at the instant they happen.

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.