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A review by rowievdvliet
Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee
3.0
3,5 stars
Story will teach all writers to do better, not just screenwriters. It analyses the craft in great detail. It will teach you to be as specific as possible and what terms like three-dimensional characters actually mean.
Having said that the book is really dense because it's stuffed with infornation. It's all interesting but I had to take breaks reading it to let everything sink in.
Another thing was really interesting to me. I really feel like Robert McKee knows what he's talking about and he is a good teacher. I could follow and agree with his teachings. And then it would cut to his examples of great films and pieces of screenplays. Mind you, some films I haven't seen or even heard of.
But I really didn't understand why this character from Casablanca carried a different emotion in every bit of dialogue (that's how it read to me). And it felt a bit uncomfortable to read a book full of praise with films about sisters practising incest and others that I perceived as sexual fantasies of white cis man. I would have liked to see more diversity in the films highlighted (although it did use examples I like like Star Wars). I don't think this book needs only examples of diverse films. It was just a weird reading experience to agree with his teachings and then dislike to examples the writer seems to think are some of the best out there.
But if you can see past that (or have a different taste in stories than I do) this is a book that will benefit any writer. I'm glad I have this in my toolkit so I can keep coming back to it to work on my own craft. Even if I never end up writing a screenplay.
Story will teach all writers to do better, not just screenwriters. It analyses the craft in great detail. It will teach you to be as specific as possible and what terms like three-dimensional characters actually mean.
Having said that the book is really dense because it's stuffed with infornation. It's all interesting but I had to take breaks reading it to let everything sink in.
Another thing was really interesting to me. I really feel like Robert McKee knows what he's talking about and he is a good teacher. I could follow and agree with his teachings. And then it would cut to his examples of great films and pieces of screenplays. Mind you, some films I haven't seen or even heard of.
But I really didn't understand why this character from Casablanca carried a different emotion in every bit of dialogue (that's how it read to me). And it felt a bit uncomfortable to read a book full of praise with films about sisters practising incest and others that I perceived as sexual fantasies of white cis man. I would have liked to see more diversity in the films highlighted (although it did use examples I like like Star Wars). I don't think this book needs only examples of diverse films. It was just a weird reading experience to agree with his teachings and then dislike to examples the writer seems to think are some of the best out there.
But if you can see past that (or have a different taste in stories than I do) this is a book that will benefit any writer. I'm glad I have this in my toolkit so I can keep coming back to it to work on my own craft. Even if I never end up writing a screenplay.