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Excerpt from
Robert McKee's renowned book, STORY.
Literary talent is not enough.
If you cannot tell a story, all those beautiful
images and subtleties of dialogue that you
spent months and months perfecting waste the
paper they're written on. What we create for
the world, what it demands of us, is story.
Now and forever. Countless writers lavish dressy
dialogue and manicured descriptions on anorexic
yams and wonder why their scripts never see
production, while others with modest literary
talent but great storytelling power have the
deep pleasure of watching their dreams living
in the light of the screen.
Of the total creative effort represented
in a finished work, 75 percent or more of a
writer's Groupor 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?
Finding the answers to these grand questions
and shaping them into story is our overwhelming
creative task.
Designing story tests the maturity
and insight of the writer, his knowledge of
society, nature, and the human heart. Story
demands both vivid imagination and powerful
analytic thought. Self-expression is never
an issue, for, wittingly or unwittingly, all
stories, honest and dishonest, wise and foolish,
faithfully mirror their maker, exposing his
humanity...or lack of it. Compared to this
terror, writing dialogue is a sweet diversion.
So the writer embraces the principle,
Tell Story...then freezes. For what is story?
The idea of story is like the idea of music.
We've heard tunes all our lives. We can dance
and sing along. We think we understand music
until we try to compose it and what comes out
of the piano scares the cat.
If both TENDER MERCIES and RAIDERS
OF THE LOST ARK are wonderful stories beautifully
told for the screen--and they are--what on
earth do they have in common? If HANNAH AND
HER SISTERS and MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL
are both brilliant comic stones delightfully
told, and they are, where do they touch? Compare
THE CRYING GAME to PARENTHOOD, TERMINATOR to
REVERSAL OF FORTUNE, UNFORGIVEN to EAT DRINK
MAN WOMAN. Or A FISH CALLED WANDA to MAN BITES
DOG, WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT to RESERVOIR DOGS.
Moving back through the decades, compare VERTIGO
to 8 1/2 to PERSONA to RASHOMON to CASABLANCA
to GREED to MODERN TIMES to THE BATTLESHIP
POTEMKIN--all superb screen stories, all vastly
different, yet all produce the same result:
an audience leaving the theatre exclaiming, "What
a great story!"
Drowning in a sea of genres and
styles, the writer may come to believe that
if all these films tell story, then anything
can be a story. But if we look deeply, if we
strip away the surface, we find that at heart
all are the same thing. Each is an embodiment
of the universal form of story. Each articulates
this form to the screen in a unique way, but
in each the essential form is identical, and
it is to this deep form that the audience is
responding when it reacts with, "What
a good story!"
Each of the arts is defined by
its essential form. From symphony to hip-hop,
the underlying form of music makes a piece
music and not noise. Whether representational
or abstract, the cardinal principles of visual
art make a canvas a painting, not a doodle.
Equally, from Homer to Ingmar Bergman, the
universal form of story shapes a work into
story, not portraiture or collage. Across all
cultures and through all ages, this innate
form has been endlessly variable but changeless.
Yet form, does not mean "formula." There
is no screenplay-writing recipe that guarantees
your cake will rise. Story is far too rich
in mystery, complexity, and flexibility to
be reduced to a formula. Only a fool would
try. Rather, a writer must grasp story form.
This is inescapable.
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