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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