Story. Robert McKee. 1997.

Robert McKee is an instructor of creative writing who has had a profound influence on Hollywood for the last 25 years. In 1983, while a Fulbright Scholar and a professor in the University of Southern California he developed a lecture series called the 'Story Seminar'. This lecture series was ultimately opened to the public and has been delivered to sold out audiences ever since.

This book covers an outline of what is presented in McKee's lecture series. It is basically a book about how to write a good screenplay. It is currently required reading in the film and cinema schools at Harvard, Yale, UCLA and USC and known as the 'Screenwriter's Bible'.

This may lead one to think that the book is of value primarily to people who are interested in writing a screenplay. In fact, the appeal is much more broad.

About three quarters of the book is focused on two subjects: elements of story and story structure. The remainder of the book concerns the creative process and contains advice for aspiring Hollywood writers. It's the former two sections that best highlight the fact that there is more going on in this book than one might think. When McKee talks about essential elements of stories and how they are built, even while he frequently references successful films to illustrate his points, it is clear that the medium of film is not necessary. The ideas that McKee discusses can be applied to any storytelling medium.

Elements of Story

McKee describes roughly a dozen different elements that are essential to any story. His approach is not structured. He bounces back and forth between topics, so the quotes below are pulled from several places.

Event

A story event creates meaningful change in the life situation of a character that is expressed and experienced in terms of a value and achieved through conflict. For example: alive/dead (positive/negative) is a story value, as are love/hate, freedom/slavery, truth/lie, courage/cowardice, loyalty/betrayal, wisdom/stupidity, strength/weakness, excitement/boredom and so on.

"Event" means change. Story Events are meaningful, not trivial. To make change meaningful it must, to begin with, happen to a character. 

Character

Characterization is the sum of all observable qualities of a human being, everything knowable through careful scrutiny: age and IQ; sex and sexuality; style of speech and gesture; choices of home, car, and dress; education and occupation; personality and nervosity; values and attitudes - all aspects of humanity we could know by taking notes on someone day in and day out. The totality of these traits makes each person unique because each of us is a one-of-a-kind combination of genetic givens and accumulated experience. The singular assemblage of traits is characterization ... but it is not character.

True character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure - the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character's essential nature. Pressure is essential. Choices made when nothing is at risk mean little.

Aesthetic Emotion

Your intellectual life prepares you for emotional experiences that then urge you toward fresh perceptions that in turn remix the chemistry of new encounters. The two realms influence each other, but first one, then the other. In fact, in life, moments that blaze with a fusion of idea and emotion are so rare, when they happen you think you're having a religious experience. But whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion.

... 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.

 Story Design

The below diagram is copied from Story:

A story begins when the protagonist acts to achieve an object of her desire. This action is believed to be minimal and conservative, all that is required to reach the desire. The action, however, prompts forces of antagonism which drive the protagonist further from her desire. At this point, the protagonist realizes that only continued action will allow her to reach her goal. Moreover, she realizes that this action involves risk.

This is also known as the story arc. A story arc involves a character striving for something they desire and in the process encountering an obstacle that forces them to change. Within the primary story arc there are minor arcs. Each arc must contain characters interacting with each other in a way that is logically consistent and encountering environmental factors that are logically consistent.

I've never taken a creative writing class or been involved in drama, so it's possible that these concepts meant more to me than they would to somebody who has been exposed to them before. McKee makes it clear that he has not discovered most of what he discusses, and in fact much of it is as old as Aristotle. But for someone with a recreational but deep interest in storytelling of all kinds, the clarity of McKee's approach was profound. Also, it would be impossible to demonstrate without additional paragraphs of quotes, but the writing is poetic in its own right. Story is a work of art about works of art.

But that is not the primary observation I want to share. The fact that these principles seem to work in any storytelling medium has broad implications.

Stories without the elements described above, and built without taking basic story structure into account do not achieve what all stories are meant to achieve. Something fails in the minds of the audience. I imagine that all of us have experienced a feeling of oneness with the protagonist while seeing a good movie, reading a good book or being told a good story. We naturally put ourselves in the shoes of the character whose experiences are being relayed to us. When these story elements are lacking, we are either not compelled to see our sameness (we are bored) or we don't believe the sameness being communicated (we don't buy it).

It can be argued that the reason storytelling works at all is due to this principle: the fact that the human mind merges the self with the protagonist. The human psyche naturally inserts itself into the protagonist role of any story it is exposed to. In this way human beings can communicate a great deal of information to each other in a short amount of time. Details that would otherwise have to be described are imagined by the audience. Good stories put us in a position to see this "truth" in a very efficient way, they only describe what is essential to put us in a believable, alternate life. 

This was the concept that really stood out to me in this book, and why I argue that it appeals to a broad audience. But it is not because the book is intended to be anything more. Story makes it clear that its purpose is to assist aspiring Hollywood writers. In doing so, however, it also shows that the purpose of a film is more than just to entertain. To me, it seems that there is a much more primal force at work, one that has been a part of human life for thousands of years.

We take for granted now that technology has made it easy to pass on great deals of detailed information to the next generation. We have whole institutions dedicated to educating our population and buildings devoted to storing our collective wisdom. For the majority of our time here, this was not possible. People had to find a way to ensure the hard lessons they had learned about the principles of life would not be lost. They had to somehow prevent the people who had done so much to shape civilization from being forgotten by their ancestors. For thousands of years, stories were the only way to do this. Either because they are inherently efficient in their ability to transmit information, or because our species adapted to their use, they became essential to the human experience.

Fragments of the oldest stories still survive today (e.g. creation stories, religious texts, pieces of wisdom, archetypes, themes, etc.) We naturally work to protect these stories by ensuring our children know about them and by creating new works of art that incorporate them. We seem to instinctively sense how important they are. We don't always know exactly what they mean, but we know they mean something.

Stories serve to define communities, cultures and nations. Whether stories like these have been passed along via oral tradition or by summer blockbusters, it is the same principle. Perhaps this comparison is obvious, but what may not be is this: behind all of these stories is a person trying to communicate more than just what is on the surface. Life is filled with subtext, symbolism and metaphor. In many cases, the authors of stories themselves may not know exactly what is beneath the story they are telling, perhaps there is meaning deep within their subconscious trying to articulate itself. Artists frequently describe the sensation that they are not creating their art, but discovering it.

Late in Story, McKee provides the following advice:

We all share the same crucial human experiences. Each of us is suffering and enjoying, dreaming and hoping of getting through our days with something of value. As a writer, you can be certain that everyone coming down the street toward you, each in his own way, is having the same fundamental human thoughts and feelings that you are. This is why when you ask yourself, "If I were this character in these circumstances, what would I do?" the honest answer is always correct. You would do the human thing. Therefore, the more you penetrate the mysteries of your own humanity, the more you come to understand yourself, the more you are able to understand others.

To me, this seems to be obviously true, but I believe the opposite is just as true: the more we understand others, the more we are able to understand ourselves. All of us know one story better than any other: the story the human psyche creates of our own experiences. The one protagonist that is all protagonists. The amalgamation of all of the stories we have ever been told. The story of "I am." 

Good stories have a depth that we do not frequently enough explore. American films are often about more than what they appear to be. I encourage you to think about this the next time you pay $12 to see the latest Hollywood offering. When you dig through a couple of layers, though, don't be surprised if you see a part of yourself looking back.