Excerpt from Robert
McKee's renowned book, STORY.
When I moved to Los Angeles, I did what
many do to keep eating and writing--I read. I worked
for UA and NBC, analyzing screen and teleplay submissions.
After the first couple hundred analyses, I felt I could
write up in advance an all-purpose Hollywood story
analyst's coverage and just fill in title and writer.
The report I wrote over and over again went like this:
Nice description, actable dialogue. Some
amusing moments, some sensitive moments. All in all,
a script of well-chosen words. The story, however,
sucks. The first thirty pages crawl on a fat belly
of exposition, the rest never get to their feet. The
main plot, what there is of it, is riddled with convenient
coincidence and weak motivation. No discernible protagonist.
Unrelated tensions that could shape into subplots never
do. Characters are never revealed to be more than they
seem. Not a moment's insight into the inner lives of
these people or their society. It's a lifeless collection
of predictable, ill-told, and cliched episodes that
wander off into a pointless haze. PASS ON
IT.
But I never wrote this report:
Great story! Grabbed me on page one and
held me in its embrace. The first act builds to a sudden
climax that spins off into a superb weave of plot and
subplot. Sublime revelations of deep character. Amazing
insight into this society. Made me laugh, made me cry.
Drove to an Act Two climax so moving that I thought
the story was over. And yet, out of the ashes of the
second act, this writer created a third act of such
power, such beauty, such magnificence I'm writing this
report from the floor. However, this script is a 270-page
grammatical nightmare with every fifth word misspelled.
Dialogue's so tangled Olivier couldn't get his tongue
around it. Descriptions are stuffed with camera directions,
sub textural explanations, and philosophical commentary.
It's not even typed in the proper format. Obviously
not a professional writer. PASS ON IT.
If I'd written this report, I'd have lost
my job.
The sign on the door doesn't read "Dialogue
Department" or "Description Department." It
reads "Story Department." A good story makes
a good film possible, while failure to make the story
work virtually guarantees disaster. A reader who can't
grasp this fundamental deserves to be fired. It's surprisingly
rare, in fact, to find a beautifully crafted story
with bad dialogue or dull description. More often than
not, the better the storytelling, the more vivid the
images, the sharper the dialogue. But lark of progression,
false motivation, redundant characters, empty subtext,
holes, and other such story problems are the root causes
of a bland, boring text.
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