Story by Robert McKee

Story Telling §

• Tell with intent. A mature artist never calls attention to himself, and a wise artist never does anything merely because it breaks convention. Stories are your grand metaphors for life..

  • Self-knowledge is the key to telling good stories — experience with introspection. A good story necessitates an insightful author.
  • Postmodernist skepticism and cynicism has made it harder to convey an idea—thus, there is a bigger need to dig deeper into life.
  • The greatest stories are those that are always contemporary—that touch on a universal or archetypal aspect of the human condition.

• For of all the reasons for wanting to write, the only one that nurtures us through time is love of the work itself.

• Why do we read stories? To seek a deeper understanding of the human condition, of life, and reality as it is and as we believe it to be.

  • Strip it to its bare components and a good story becomes words on a paper that tell something the world wants to hear—stories born out of a love for life’s various facets through one’s own introspection, told in the way the world wants to hear it.
  • The fallacies of bad writing:
    1. The more accurate your observations, the more truth you tell in your stories. However, what matters more in stories is depth rather than surface-level detail. What happens is not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.
    2. The more spectacle, the more entertainment. This mistakes short-term pleasure for profound, long term appreciation. Spectacle only serves to enrich the presentation of an already good story.
  • A story must abstract life to discover its essences, but not to the point it loses sense. Life-like but not trivial. A balance between fact and imagination.
  • Remember. It is not just what you have to say but how you say it.
    • … and how you say it is not just through words.

Story Elements §

• A character’s life story is in itself a story. Good stories give us headroom to imagine what the character’s life is, even if the entirety of their life story was never told. Good stories have structure

  • The choice of what plot structure to use is reflective of one’s politics.
    • Use of archplots imply an optimistic sense that life will change. They imply absolutism.
    • Use of extreme miniplots, antiplots, and nonplots imply a pessimistic sense that life does not change, and the change is more negative than positive. They imply relativism and absurdism.
    • Most audiences tend to gravitate to archplots because they are inline with the belief that the classical design is a mirror of the human mind and how it intuitively recollects stories
    • Few audiences (all but the most diehard), can keep up with the inconsistent antiplot, the passive miniplot, and the stasis of nonplots.
    • Avant-garde exists to oppose the popular and commercial, until it too becomes popular and commercial, then it turns to attack itself. At the end of the day, Avant-garde necessitates an understanding of what is Classical in order to break the rules.
    • Most gravitate to avant-garde, not because they embody the philosophy, but because avant-garde is contrarian. Thus, do not let pretentiousness destroy your work.

• Tropes show that no work is original. However, work becomes cliche when the writer does not know the world of his story—the audience, instead, already knew what this setting was more than the author

• Consider Genre

• Consider Character Writing as one with structure. Plot affects characters. Characters drive plot.

• Consider adding theme in the story.

Principles of Story Design §

• The substance of story is intangible. You don’t need words to tell a story. It is rooted in the gap between what we believe or expect to happen and what actually happens. In other words, Story is rooted in conflict.

• A protagonist is inevitable for any story.

• The key to writing compelling characters is to enter their heads and simulate what they would think, feel, and do, then compare that to the objective reality of the story to move the story forward.¹

  • Deeper insight is gained about the characters by looking at their reactions.

• Keep in mind: Author, Authority, Authenticity.

  • As the author, you are the creator of an original world.
  • As the authority, you are godlike. You know everything about the world of the setting.
  • The audience must willingly suspend their disbelief to maintain their empathy. Doing so requires authentic writing — consistent, believable, convincing. The prerequisite to touching the audience is getting them to believe.
  • A unique style is achieved through authenticity. How you arrange the work is unique to you.

The Writer’s Method §

Outside In §

• Dream up an idea, think about it, and then write.
• This style clings to ideas that simply do not work in the story.
• This strategy does not work.

Inside Out §

• This style is willing to kill its babies, what don’t work.

Step Outlines §

• Tell the story in steps.
  • Describe each scene in a few sentences,
  • Then identify the role of these scenes in the story.
  • At the same time, conduct research. Worldbuild, develop character backstories and exposition.
• The goal is to pitch the premise of the story — without the fluff of dialogue and descriptions.
  • If the story cannot be described in a short time within a few minutes / lines, how will it hold for more?

Treatment §

• Expand the step outline more and more.
• Change what doesn’t work from the step outline accordingly, but do not change the design of the story.

Translation §

• Expand the draft from the treatment step further through dialogue, exposition, and description.
• Put off dialogue for as soon as possible.

Links §

• Story by Robert McKee
  • Chapter 1 Reads like an Essay on why we read stories and why mass production of stories has led to its decline.
• A brief summary of Story by Robert McKee on Reddit

Footnotes §

1. Remark: Think of it as roleplaying each character and seeing what happens. ↩