Day 60, Quasi-Quarantine: Navigate Verbosity To Mine The Gems In Robert McKee's "Story"

Robert McKee is unquestionably a Hollywood legend, and in "Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting," he shares his invaluable wisdom in the form of case studies.

"The substance of story is the gap that splits open between what a human being expects to happen when he takes an action and what really does happen; the rift between expectation and result, probability and necessity. To build a scene, we constantly break open these breaches in reality."

At times, this work reads like an ad for screenwriting classes and schools, and McKee's excessively verbose style makes it feel as if he is trying too hard to be pedantic. It can seem a bit like reading a textbook at times, there were more errors than I would have anticipated, and I feel like he casually butts up against chauvinism a lot for having written this in 1997.

Where the book excels is a catalog of glossary terms, story diagrams, and specific examples pulled from cinema. McKee is at his best when he is offering an explanation of genres and how they intersect, and the plea he makes for a return to the value of treatments pays the book off by itself.

"No matter our talent, we all know in the midnight of our souls that 90 percent of what we do is less than our best. If, however, research inspires a pace of ten to one, even twenty to one, and if you then make brilliant choices to find that 10 percent of excellence and burn the rest, every scene will fascinate and the world will sit in awe of your genius."

In one chapter, he dreams up a scenario about a President going mad as the idea for a story, which was, well, eerie and disturbingly prescient. 

"Those in power never want us to feel. Thought can be controlled and manipulated, but emotion is willful and unpredictable. Artists threaten authority by exposing lies and inspiring passion for change. This is why when tyrants seize power, their firing squads aim at the heart of the writer."

I've also read McKee's book "Dialogue," and I feel strongly that a writer of any discipline can benefit from his insights. They can comprise a slog, but the value is well worth the effort.