#robert mckee

[thepersonalwords]

Nothing moves forward in a story except through conflict. Writers who cannot grasp this truth, the truth of conflict, writers who have been misled by the counterfeit comforts of modern life into believing that life is easy once you know how to play the game. These writers give conflict a false inflection. The scripts they write fail for one of two reasons, either a glut of banal conflict or a lack of meaningful conflict. The former are exercises in turbo special effects written by those who follow textbook imperatives to create conflict but because they're disinterested in or insensitive to the honest struggles of life, devise overwrought excuses for mayhem. The latter are tedious portraits written in reaction against conflict itself, these writers take the pollyanna view, that life would really be nice if it weren't for conflict. What writers at these extremes fail to realize is that while the quality of conflict in life changes as it shifts from level to level, the quantity of conflict is constant. When we remove conflict from one level of life, it amplifies ten times over on another level. When, for example, we don't have to work from dawn to dark to put bread on the table, we now have time to reflect on the great conflict within our mind and heart or we may become aware of the terrible tyrannies and suffering in the world at large. As Jean-Paul Sartre expressed it, "The essence of reality is scarcity. There isn't enough love in the world, enough food, enough justice, enough time in life. To gain any sense of satisfaction in our life we must go in to heady conflict with the forces of scarcity. To be alive is to be in perpetual conflict at one or all three levels of our lives.

Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

[i-just-want-to-destroy]

Story, Robert McKee

[bluepurpleviolatte]

''Deus ex machina not only erases all meaning and emotion, it’s an insult to the audience. Each of us knows we must choose and act, for better or worse, to determine the meaning of our lives. No one and nothing coincidental will come along to take that responsibility from us, regardless of the injustices and chaos around us. You could be locked in a cell for the rest of your life for a crime you did not commit. But every morning you would still have to get up and make meaning. Do I bludgeon my brains against this wall or do I find some way to get through my days with value? Our lives are ultimately in our own hands. Deus ex machina is an insult because it is a lie.''

-Robert McKee, Story

[veryslowreader]

Story by Robert McKee

Adaptation

[lets-steal-an-archive]

William Goldman argues that the key to all story endings is to give the audience what it wants, but not the way it expects. A very provocative principle: First of all, what does the audience want? Many producers state without blinking that the audience wants a happy ending. They say this because up-ending films tend to make more money than down-ending films.

The reason for this is that a small percentage of the audience won’t go to any film that might give it an unpleasant experience. Generally their excuse is that they have enough tragedy in their lives. But if we were to look closely, we'd discover that they not only avoid negative emotions in movies, they avoid them in life. Such people think that happiness means never suffering, so they never feel anything deeply. The depth of our joy is in direct proportion to what we've suffered. Holocaust survivors, for example, don’t avoid dark films. They go because such stories resonate with their past and are deeply cathartic.

In fact, down-ending films are often huge commercial successes: DANGEROUS LIAISONS, eighty million dollars; THE WAR OF THE ROSES, one hundred fifty million; THE ENGLISH PATIENT, two hundred twenty-five million. No one can count THE GODFATHER, PART II's money. For the vast majority doesn't care if a film ends up or down. What the audience wants is emotional satisfaction a Climax that fulfills anticipation. How should THE GODFATHER, PART II end? Michael forgives Fredo, quits the mob, and moves to Boston with his family to sell insurance? The Climax of this magnificent film is truthful, beautiful, and very satisfying.

Who determines which particular emotion will satisfy an audience at the end of a film? The writer. From the way he tells his story from the beginning, he whispers to the audience: "Expect an up-ending" or "Expect a down-ending" or "Expect irony." Having pledged a certain emotion, it'd be ruinous not to deliver. So we give the audience the experience we've promised, but not in the way it expects. This is what separates artist from amateur.

In Aristotle's words, an ending must be both "inevitable and unexpected." Inevitable in the sense that as the Inciting Incident occurs, everything and anything seems possible, but at Climax, as the audience looks back through the telling, it should seem that the path the telling took was the only path. Given the characters and their world as we've come to understand it, the Climax was inevitable and satisfying. But at the same time it must be unexpected, happening in a way the audience could not have anticipated.

Anyone can deliver a happy ending – just give the characters everything they want. Or a downer – just kill everybody. An artist gives us the emotion he's promised…but with a rush of unexpected insight that he's withheld to a Turning Point within the Climax itself. So that as the protagonist improvises his final effort, he may or may not achieve his desire, but the flood of insight that pours from the gap delivers the hoped – for emotion but in a way we could never have foreseen.

Source: McKee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. HarperCollins e-books, 2010: 309-310.

[usunezukoinezu]

As you compose dialogue, I think it’s useful to imagine character design as three concentric spheres, one inside the other—a self within a self within a self. This three-tiered complex fills dialogue with content of thought and feeling while shaping expression in gesture and word. The innermost sphere churns with the unsayable; the middle sphere restrains the unsaid; the outer sphere releases the said.

Robert McKee

[petitjeanofficial]

Anything that a person can do to alleviate the suffering of others, is a meaningful thing. Stories do exactly that. They make life livable.

Robert McKee

[theticklishpear]