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

Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, originally published in 1997, has become the definitive guidebook for film and TV writing for film and TV. Before its publication as a text, Story was originally a live seminar Robert McKee held in the 1980s at the University of Southern California. In 1984 he opened up the seminar to the public, and it has been growing ever since. The seminar has since expanded to include a genre-specific seminar and a “Storynomics” seminar for writers in business and marketing. Story as a written text won the 1999 International Moving Image Book Award and is required reading at Harvard, Yale, UCLA, USC and Tulane universities. While specifically geared toward students of screenwriting, Story has been lauded as an essential guide to the craft for writers in all mediums.

Summary

Story opens with a discourse on why Robert McKee wrote the text and what he hopes to accomplish with his work. He explores the contemporary film industry and how he believes it is struggling due to a lack of fundamental craftsmanship, which students today are not learning. We briefly visit the author’s beginnings as a script reader and how he learned from the range of the scripts submitted for review. The author also talks about the difference between craft and talent and how each one supports the other. He then explains the spectrum of story structure and its independent parts: beat, scene, sequence, act, and story. With these as guideposts, McKee examines the three potential story plots: the archplot, the miniplot, and the antiplot (with one bonus round: the nonplot). Within these are discussions of “Hollywood films” and “Art films,” and we take a closer look at the politics of writing within these broad genres.

Looking at setting and the idea of “creative limitation,” we explore the concept of time and place and their relationship to story structure, as well as story structure’s relationship to genre. McKee lists the 25 story types used by screenwriters today and discusses how to work within genre convention: The “creative limitation” of these and other guidelines or structures can stretch our creative limits in new ways.

Moving forward, the book explores the relationship between story structure, plot, and character, as well as the contrasting ideas of character and characterization. Both character and characterization have a deep and profound effect on the plot, but in different ways. Through character we move to theme, or “controlling idea,” and how to communicate it emotionally and resonantly. McKee also discusses the role of a storyteller in society and their responsibility to their craft and to the world.

The next chapters compare screenwriting to other art forms and examine the foundational raw material of storytelling. To this end, they look at how to create empathy for a central character, as well as how to use the three levels of conflict—inner, personal, and extra-personal—to create a convincing story world and play with the audience’s expectation. We revisit the concept of setting and worldbuilding in more detail to consider how they affect the central conflicts of our story. From this story world emerges the inciting incident—the event that launches the story into being. From here the story develops progressive complications and conflicts to form scene sequences, and McKee explains how to best use the various levels of conflict (as well as turning points and emotional transitions) to build tension in a scene. The author then compares a story’s text with its subtext and shows us how we can use them to give depth and complexity to our characters.

The book then shows us the different ways to string scenes together into a story, providing a sense of unity, variety, and natural progression as the story’s climax approaches. McKee defines the crisis, climax, and resolution of a story and displays how they are natural progressions of the story and the forces set in motion by the inciting incident. The next chapter explores how to create convincing and engaging antagonistic forces for the protagonist, with examples of layers of conflict stemming from core thematic ideas.

Once those story elements are in place, we take a look at some of the pitfalls new writers face, beginning with exposition. McKee explains the purpose of exposition and explores how to incorporate it delicately without taking away from the forward movement of the story. The next chapter troubleshoots some of the other obstacles a writer might face: interest, surprise, coincidence, comedy, melodrama, point of view, and plot holes. Story provides solutions and discussion topics to navigate these challenges. McKee also takes a deeper look at character and characterization, including how to create dynamic and empathetic characters in a story and how to allow for the actor’s natural imprint in the final performance. The final chapters of the text look at how to write dialogue and description as well as at McKee’s personal method of developing a screenplay from start to finish.