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.