by Robert McKee
The next time you go to the movies, sit in the front row at the wall, so you can watch an audience watch a film. It’s very instructive: Eyebrows fly up, mouths drop open, bodies flinch and rock, laughter explodes, tears run down faces. Every time the gap splits open for character, it opens for audience. With each turn, the character must pour more energy and effort into his next action. The audience, in empathy with the character, feels the same surges of energy building beat by beat through the film.
As a charge of electricity leaps from pole to pole in a magnet, so the spark of life ignites across the gap between the self and reality. With this flash of energy we ignite the power of story and move the heart of the audience.
8
THE INCITING INCIDENT
A story is a design in five parts: The Inciting Incident, the first major event of the telling, is the primary cause for all that follows, putting into motion the other four elements—Progressive Complications, Crisis, Climax, Resolution. To understand how the Inciting Incident enters into and functions within the work, let’s step back to take a more comprehensive look at setting, the physical and social world in which it occurs.
THE WORLD OF THE STORY
We’ve defined setting in terms of period, duration, location, and level of conflict. These four dimensions frame the story’s world, but to inspire the multitude of creative choices you need to tell an original, cliché-free story, and you must fill that frame with a depth and breadth of detail. Below is a list of general questions we ask of all stories. Beyond these, each work inspires a unique list of its own, driven by the writer’s thirst for insight.
How do my characters make a living? We spend a third or more of our lives at work, yet rarely see scenes of people doing their jobs. The reason is simple: Most work is boring. Perhaps not to the person doing the work, but boring to watch. As any lawyer, cop, or doctor knows, the vast majority of their time is spent in routine duties, reports, and meetings that change little or nothing—the epitome of expectation meeting result. That’s why in the professional genres—Courtroom, Crime, Medical—we focus on only those moments when work causes more problems than it solves. Nonetheless, to get inside a character, we must question all aspects of their twenty-four-hour day. Not only work, but how do they play? Pray? Make love?
What are the politics of my world? Not necessarily politics in terms of right-wing/left-wing, Republican/Democrat, but in the true sense of the word: power. Politics is the name we give to the orchestration of power in any society. Whenever human beings gather to do anything, there’s always an uneven distribution of power. In corporations, hospitals, religions, government agencies, and the like, someone at the top has great power, people at the bottom have little or none, those in between have some. How does a worker gain power or lose it? No matter how we try to level inequalities, applying egalitarian theories of all kinds, human societies are stubbornly and inherently pyramidal in their arrangement of power. In other words, politics.
Even when writing about a household, question its politics, for like any other social structure, a family is political. Is it a patriarchal home where Dad has the clout, but when he leaves the house, it transfers to Mom, then when she’s out, to the oldest child? Or is it a matriarchal home, where Mom runs things? Or a contemporary family in which the kid is tyrannizing his parents?
Love relationships are political. An old Gypsy expression goes: “He who confesses first loses.” The first person to say “I love you” has lost because the other, upon hearing it, immediately smiles a knowing smile, realizing that he’s the one loved, so he now controls the relationship. If you’re lucky, those three little words will be said in unison over candlelight. Or, if very, very lucky, they won’t need to be said… they’ll be done.
What are the rituals of my world? In all corners of the world life is bound up in ritual. This is a ritual, is it not? I’ve written a book and you’re reading it. In another time and place we might sit under a tree or take a walk, like Socrates and his students. We create a ritual for every activity, not only for public ceremony but for our very private rites. Heaven help the person who rearranges my organization of toiletries around the bathroom basin.
How do your characters take meals? Eating is a different ritual everywhere in the world. Americans, for example, according to a recent survey, now eat 75 percent of all their meals in restaurants. If your characters eat at home, is it an old-fashioned family that dresses for dinner at a certain hour, or a contemporary one that feeds from an open refrigerator?
What are the values in my world? What do my characters consider good? Evil? What do they see as right? Wrong? What are my society’s laws? Realize that good/evil, right/wrong, and legal/illegal don’t necessarily have anything to do with one another. What do my characters believe is worth living for? Foolish to pursue? What would they give their lives for?
What is the genre or combination of genres? With what conventions? As with setting, genres surround the writer with creative limitations that must be kept or brilliantly altered.
What are the biographies of my characters? From the day they were born to the opening scene, how has life shaped them?
What is the Backstory? This is an oft-misunderstood term. It doesn’t mean life history or biography. Backstory is the set of significant events that occurred in the characters’ past that the writer can use to build his story’s progressions. Exactly how we use Backstory to tell story will be discussed later, but for the moment note that we do not bring characters out of a void. We landscape character biographies, planting them with events that become a garden we’ll harvest again and again.
What is my cast design? Nothing in a work of art is there by accident. Ideas may come spontaneously, but we must weave them consciously and creatively into the whole. We cannot allow any character who comes to mind to stumble into the story and play a part. Each role must fit a purpose, and the first principle of cast design is polarization. Between the various roles we devise a network of contrasting or contradictory attitudes.
If the ideal cast sat down for dinner and something happened, whether as trivial as spilled wine or as important as a divorce announcement, from each and every character would come a separate and distinctively different reaction. No two would react the same because no two share the same attitude toward anything. Each is an individual with a character-specific view of life, and the disparate reaction of each contrasts with all others.
If two characters in your cast share the same attitude and react in kind to whatever occurs, you must either collapse the two into one, or expel one from the story. When characters react the same, you minimize opportunities for conflict. Instead, the writer’s strategy must be to maximize these opportunities.
Imagine this cast: father, mother, daughter, and a son named Jeffrey. This family lives in Iowa. As they sit down for dinner, Jeffrey turns to them and says: “Mom, Dad, Sis, I’ve come to a big decision. I have an airline ticket and tomorrow I’m leaving for Hollywood to pursue a career as an art director in the movies.” And all three respond: “Oh, what a wonderful idea! Isn’t that great? Jeff’s going off to Hollywood!” And they toast him with their glasses of milk.
CUT TO: Jeff’s room, where they help him pack while admiring his pictures on the wall, reflecting nostalgically on his days in art school, complimenting his talent, predicting success.
CUT TO: The airport as the family puts Jeff on the plane, tears in their eyes, embracing him: “Write when you get work, Jeff.”
Suppose, instead, Jeffrey sits down for dinner, delivers his declaration, and suddenly Dad’s fist POUNDS the table: “What the hell are you talking about, Jeff? You’re not going off to Hollyweird to become some art director… whatever an art director is. No, you’re staying right here in Davenport. Because, Jeff, as you know, I have never done anything for myself. Not in my entire life. It’s all for you, Jeff, for you! Granted, I’m the king of plumbing supplies in Iowa… but someday, son, you’ll be emperor of plumbing supplies all over the
Midwest and I won’t hear another word of this nonsense. End of discussion.”
CUT TO: Jeff sulking in his room. His mother slips in whispering: “Don’t you listen to him. Go off to Hollywood, become an art director… whatever that is. Do they win Oscars for that, Jeff?” “Yes, Mom, they do,” Jeff says. “Good! Go off to Hollywood and win me an Oscar and prove that bastard wrong. And you can do it, Jeff. Because you’ve got talent. I know you’ve got talent. You got that from my side of the family. I used to have talent too, but I gave it all up when I married your father, and I’ve regretted it ever since. For God’s sake, Jeff, don’t sit here in Davenport. Hell, this town was named after a sofa. No, go off to Hollywood and make me proud.”
CUT TO: Jeff packing. His sister comes in, shocked, “Jeff! What are you doing? Packing? Leaving me alone? With those two? You know how they are. They’ll eat me alive. If you go off to Hollywood, I’ll end up in the plumbing supply business!” Pulling his stuff out of the suitcase: “If you wanna be an artist, you can be an artist anywhere. A sunset’s a sunset. A landscape’s a landscape. What the hell difference does it make? And someday you’ll have success. I know you will. I’ve seen paintings just like yours… in Sears. Don’t leave, Jeff! I’ll die!”
Whether or not Jeff goes off to Hollywood, the polarized cast gives the writer something we all desperately need: scenes.
AUTHORSHIP
When research of setting reaches the saturation point, something miraculous happens. Your story takes on a unique atmosphere, a personality that sets it apart from every other story ever told, no matter how many millions there have been through time. It’s an amazing phenomenon: Human beings have told one another stories since they sat around the fire in caves, and every time the storyteller uses the art in its fullest, his story, like a portrait by a master painter, becomes one of a kind.
Like the stories you’re striving to tell, you want to be one of a kind, recognized and respected as an original. In your quest, consider these three words: “author,” “authority,” “authenticity.”
First, “author.” “Author” is a title we easily give novelists and playwrights, rarely screenwriters. But in the strict sense of “originator,” the screenwriter, as creator of setting, characters, and story, is an author. For the test of authorship is knowledge. A true author, no matter the medium, is an artist with godlike knowledge of his subject, and the proof of his authorship is that his pages smack of authority. What a rare pleasure it is to open a screenplay and immediately surrender to the work, giving over emotion and concentration because there is something ineffable between and under the lines that says: “This writer knows. I’m in the hands of an authority.” And the effect of writing with authority is authenticity.
Two principles control the emotional involvement of an audience. First, empathy: identification with the protagonist that draws us into the story, vicariously rooting for our own desires in life. Second, authenticity: We must believe, or as Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggested, we must willingly suspend our disbelief. Once involved, the writer must keep us involved to FADE OUT. To do so, he must convince us that the world of his story is authentic. We know that storytelling is a ritual surrounding a metaphor for life. To enjoy this ceremony in the dark we react to stories as if they’re real. We suspend our cynicism and believe in the tale as long as we find it authentic. The moment it lacks credibility, empathy dissolves and we feel nothing.
Authenticity, however, does not mean actuality. Giving a story a contemporary milieu is no guarantee of authenticity; authenticity means an internally consistent world, true to itself in scope, depth, and detail. As Aristotle tells us: “For the purposes of [story] a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility.” We can all list films that had us moaning: “I don’t buy it. People aren’t like that. Makes no sense. That’s not how things happen.”
Authenticity has nothing to do with so-called reality. A story set in a world that could never exist could be absolutely authentic. Story arts do not distinguish between reality and the various nonrealities of fantasy, dream, and ideality. The creative intelligence of the writer merges all these into a unique yet convincing fictional reality.
ALIEN: In the opening sequence the crew of an interstellar cargo ship awakes from its stasis chambers and gathers at the mess table. Dressed in work shirts and dungarees, they drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. On the table a toy bird bobs in a glass. Elsewhere, little collectibles of life clutter the living spaces. Plastic bugs hang from the ceiling, pinups and family photos are taped to the bulkhead. The crew talks—not about work or getting home—but about money. Is this unscheduled stop in their contract? Will the company pay bonuses for this extra duty?
Have you ever ridden in the cab of an eighteen-wheeler? How are they decorated? With the little collectibles of life: a plastic saint on the dashboard, blue ribbons won at a county fair, family photos, magazine clippings. Teamsters spend more time in their trucks than at home, so they take pieces of home on the road. And when they take a break, what’s the first topic of talk? Money—golden time, overtime, is this in our contract? Understanding this psychology, screenwriter Dan O’Bannon recreated it in subtle details, so as that the scene played, the audience surrendered, thinking: “Wonderful! They’re not spacemen like Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon. They’re truck drivers.”
In the next sequence, as Kane (John Hurt) investigates an alien growth, something springs out and smashes through the helmet of his space suit. Like a huge crab, the creature covers Kane’s face, its legs locked around his head. What’s worse, it’s forced a tube down his throat and into his belly, putting him in a coma. Science Officer Ash (Ian Holm) realizes he can’t pry the creature loose without ripping Kane’s face apart, so he decides to release the creature’s grip by severing its legs one at a time.
But as Ash applies a laser saw to the first leg, the flesh splits and out spits a viscous substance; a blistering “acid blood” that dissolves steel like sugar and eats a hole through the floor as big as a watermelon. The crew rushes to the deck below and looks up to see the acid eating through the ceiling, then burning a hole just as big through that floor. They rush down another deck and it’s eating through that ceiling and floor until three decks down the acid finally peters out. At this point, one thought passed through the audience: “These people are in deep shit.”
In other words, O’Bannon researched his alien. He asked himself, “What is the biology of my beast? How does it evolve? Feed? Grow? Reproduce? Does it have any weaknesses? What are its strengths?” Imagine the list of attributes O’Bannon must have concocted before seizing on “acid blood.” Imagine the many sources he may have explored. Perhaps he did an intense study of earth-bound parasitical insects, or remembered the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf in which the blood of Grendel the water monster burns through the hero’s shield, or it came to him in a nightmare. Whether through investigation, imagination, or memory, O’Bannon’s alien is a stunning creation.
All the artists making ALIEN—writer, director, designers, actors—worked to the limit of their talents to create an authentic world. They knew that believability is the key to terror. Indeed, if the audience is to feel any emotion, it must believe. For when a film’s emotional load becomes too sad, too horrifying, even too funny, how do we try to escape? We say to ourselves: “It’s only a movie.” We deny its authenticity. But if the film’s of quality, the second we glance back at the screen, we’re grabbed by the throat and pulled right back into those emotions. We won’t escape until the film lets us out, which is what we paid our money for in the first place.
Authenticity depends on the “telling detail.” When we use a few selected details, the audience’s imagination supplies the rest, completing a credible whole. On the other hand, if the writer and director try too hard to be “real”—especially with sex and violence—the audience reaction is: “That’s not really real,” or “My God, that’s so real,” or “They’re not really fucking,” or “My G
od, they’re really fucking.” In either case, credibility shatters as the audience is yanked out of the story to notice the filmmaker’s technique. An audience believes as long as we don’t give them reason to doubt.
Beyond physical and social detail, we must also create emotional authenticity. Authorial research must pay off in believable character behavior. Beyond behavioral credibility, the story itself must persuade. From event to event, cause and effect must be convincing, logical. The art of story design lies in the fine adjustment of things both usual and unusual to things universal and archetypal. The writer whose knowledge of subject has taught him exactly what to stress and expand versus what to lay down quietly and subtly will stand out from the thousands of others who always hit the same note.
Originality lies in the struggle for authenticity, not eccentricity. A personal style, in other words, cannot be achieved self-consciously. Rather, when your authorial knowledge of setting and character meets your personality, the choices you make and the arrangements you create out of this mass of material are unique to you. Your work becomes what you are, an original.
Compare a Waldo Salt story (MIDNIGHT COWBOY, SERPICO) with an Alvin Sargent story (DOMINICK AND EUGENE, ORDINARY PEOPLE): one hard-edged, the other tender, one elliptical, the other linear, one ironic, the other compassionate. The unique story styles of each is the natural and spontaneous effect of an author mastering his subject in the never-ending battle against clichés.
THE INCITING INCIDENT
Starting from any Premise at any point in the story’s chronology, our research feeds the invention of events, the events redirect research. We do not, in other words, necessarily design a story by beginning with its first major event. But at some point as you create your universe, you’ll face these questions: How do I set my story into action? Where do I place this crucial event?