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A review by glendonrfrank
Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee
5.0
It's genuinely very funny that this took me twice as long to read as War and Peace.
A year ago now I fulfilled a long-held dream of reading Campbell's "Hero With A Thousand Faces" and found myself irrevocably disappointed. Instead of a revolutionary textbook on art and structure, I found a muddied, colonial reshaping of religion into a toothless self-help narrative. Shortly into "Story" I realized that this, instead, was the book I had long been waiting for. McKee is constantly instructive, entertaining, insightful, and surprisingly simple, trading Campbell's Oedipal obsessions with the basic question: what moves people? The art of story is, more often than not, an emotional one, and McKee's explorations of story structure and mechanics always drive into finding the sense of humanity within everything.
In my work recently I have been on occasion running into high school students looking for the best college in which to become a screenwriter, and my McKee-informed answer is in essence that going to school specifically for screenwriting is a waste of time. With books like this, anyone could become a competent screenwriter; the important thing is, do you know how to tell a story? McKee's book crosses all sorts of boundaries - it may be focused on film, but his core points hold universally true for any medium of writing. When I call this the ultimate writing textbook, I don't mean that it's stodgy or unwieldy, I mean that it's so innately practical and accessible that I can't imagine not relying on it for my entire future. McKee doesn't just hit the nail on the head, he shows you how to build the entire porch. Simply a phenomenal read.
Anyways, I'm about to not be working 12-hour shifts every day, so I'm excited to actually get back to reading and ignore how much the past couple months have devastated by Goodreads metrics.
A year ago now I fulfilled a long-held dream of reading Campbell's "Hero With A Thousand Faces" and found myself irrevocably disappointed. Instead of a revolutionary textbook on art and structure, I found a muddied, colonial reshaping of religion into a toothless self-help narrative. Shortly into "Story" I realized that this, instead, was the book I had long been waiting for. McKee is constantly instructive, entertaining, insightful, and surprisingly simple, trading Campbell's Oedipal obsessions with the basic question: what moves people? The art of story is, more often than not, an emotional one, and McKee's explorations of story structure and mechanics always drive into finding the sense of humanity within everything.
In my work recently I have been on occasion running into high school students looking for the best college in which to become a screenwriter, and my McKee-informed answer is in essence that going to school specifically for screenwriting is a waste of time. With books like this, anyone could become a competent screenwriter; the important thing is, do you know how to tell a story? McKee's book crosses all sorts of boundaries - it may be focused on film, but his core points hold universally true for any medium of writing. When I call this the ultimate writing textbook, I don't mean that it's stodgy or unwieldy, I mean that it's so innately practical and accessible that I can't imagine not relying on it for my entire future. McKee doesn't just hit the nail on the head, he shows you how to build the entire porch. Simply a phenomenal read.
Anyways, I'm about to not be working 12-hour shifts every day, so I'm excited to actually get back to reading and ignore how much the past couple months have devastated by Goodreads metrics.