Story

by Robert McKee

  Realizing he’s at risk, the protagonist draws upon greater willpower and capacity to struggle through this gap and take a second, more difficult action. But again the effect is to provoke forces of antagonism, opening a second gap between expectation and result.

  The audience now senses that this too is a point of no return. Moderate actions like the second won’t succeed. Therefore, all actions of this magnitude and quality must be eliminated.

  At greater risk, the character must adjust to his changed circumstances and take an action that demands even more willpower and personal capacity, expecting or at least hoping for a helpful or manageable reaction from his world. But once more the gap flies open as even more powerful forces of antagonism react to his third action.

  Again, the audience recognizes that this is yet another point of no return. The more extreme actions won’t get the character what he wants, so these too are canceled out of consideration.

  Progressions build by drawing upon greater and greater capacities from characters, demanding greater and greater willpower from them, putting them at greater and greater risk, constantly passing points of no return in terms of the magnitude or quality of action.

  A story must not retreat to actions of lesser quality or magnitude, but move progressively forward to a final action beyond which the audience cannot imagine another.

  How many times have you had this experience? A film begins well, hooking you into the lives of the characters. It builds with strong interest over the first half-hour to a major Turning Point. But then forty or fifty minutes into the film, it starts to drag. Your eyes wander from the screen; you glance at your watch; you wish you’d bought more popcorn; you start paying attention to the anatomy of the person you came with. Perhaps the film gains pace again and finishes well, but for twenty or thirty flabby minutes in the middle you lost interest.

  If you look closely at the soft bellies that hang out over the belt of so many films, you’ll discover that this is where the writer’s insight and imagination went limp. He couldn’t build progressions, so in effect he put the story in retrograde. In the middle of Act Two he’s given his characters lesser actions of the kind they’ve already done in Act One—not identical actions but actions of a similar size or kind: minimal, conservative, and by now trivial. As we watch, our instincts tell us that these actions didn’t get the character what he wanted in Act One, therefore they’re not going to get him what he wants in Act Two. The writer is recycling story and we’re treading water.

  The only way to keep a film’s current flowing and rising is research—imagination, memory, fact. Generally, a feature-length Archplot is designed around forty to sixty scenes that conspire into twelve to eighteen sequences that build into three or more acts that top one another continuously to the end of the line. To create forty to sixty scenes and not repeat yourself, you need to invent hundreds. After sketching this mountain of material, tunnel to find those few gems that will build sequences and acts into memorable and moving points of no return. For if you devise only the forty to sixty scenes needed to fill the 120 pages of a screenplay, your work is almost certain to be antiprogressive and repetitious.

  The Law of Conflict

  When the protagonist steps out of the Inciting Incident, he enters a world governed by the Law of Conflict. To wit: Nothing moves forward in a story except through conflict.

  Put another way, conflict is to storytelling what sound is to music. Both story and music are temporal arts, and the single most difficult task of the temporal artist is to hook our interest, hold our uninterrupted concentration, then carry us through time without an awareness of the passage of time.

  In music, this effect is accomplished through sound. Instruments or voices capture us and move us along, making time vanish. Suppose we were listening to a symphony and the orchestra suddenly fell silent. What would be the effect? First, confusion as we wonder why they’ve stopped, then very quickly we would hear in our imaginations the sound of a ticking clock. We would become acutely aware of the passage of time, and because time is so subjective, if the orchestra were silent for just three minutes, it would seem like thirty.

  The music of story is conflict. As long as conflict engages our thoughts and emotions we travel through the hours unaware of the voyage. Then suddenly the film’s over. We glance at our watches, amazed. But when conflict disappears, so do we. The pictorial interest of eye-pleasing photography or the aural pleasures of a beautiful score may hold us briefly, but if conflict is kept on hold for too long, our eyes leave the screen. And when our eyes leave the screen they take thought and emotion with them.

  The Law of Conflict is more than an aesthetic principle; it is the soul of story. Story is metaphor for life, and to be alive is to be in seemingly perpetual conflict. As Jean-Paul Sartre expressed it, the essence of reality is scarcity, a universal and eternal lacking. There isn’t enough of anything in this world to go around. Not enough food, not enough love, not enough justice, and never enough time. Time, as Heidegger observed, is the basic category of existence. We live in its ever-shrinking shadow, and if we are to achieve anything in our brief being that lets us die without feeling we’ve wasted our time, we will have to go into heady conflict with the forces of scarcity that deny our desires.

  Writers who cannot grasp the truth of our transitory existence, who have been mislead by the counterfeit comforts of the modern world, who believe that life is easy once you know how to play the game, give conflict a false inflection. Their scripts fail for one of two reasons: either a glut of meaningless and absurdly violent conflict, or a vacancy of meaningful and honestly expressed 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 phony, 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. Therefore, their films avoid it in favor of low-key depictions to suggest that if we learned to communicate a little better, be a little more charitable, respect the environment, humanity could return to paradise. But if history has taught us anything, it’s that when toxic nightmare is finally cleaned up, the homeless provided shelter, and the world converted to solar energy, each of us will still be up to our eyebrows in mulch.

  Writers at these extremes fail to realize that while the quality of conflict changes as it shifts from level to level, the quantity of conflict in life is constant. Something is always lacking. Like squeezing a balloon, the volume of conflict never changes, it just bulges in another direction. When we remove conflict from one level of life, it amplifies ten times over on another level.

  If, for example, we manage to satisfy our external desires and find harmony with the world, in short order serenity turns to boredom. Now Sartre’s “scarcity” is the absence of conflict itself. Boredom is the inner conflict we suffer when we lose desire, when we lack a lacking. What’s worse, if we were to put on screen the conflictless existence of a character who, day-in, day-out, lives in placid contentment, the boredom in the audience would be palpably painful.

  By and large, the struggle for physical survival has been eliminated for the educated classes of the industrialized nations. This security from the outside world gives us time to reflect on the world inside. Once housed, dressed, fed, and medicated, we take a breath and realize how incomplete we are as human beings. We want more than physical comfort, we want, of all things, happiness, and so begin the wars of the inner life.

  If, as a writer, however, you find that the conflicts of mind, body, emotions, and soul do not interest you, then look into the Third World and see how the rest of humanity lives. The majority suffer short, painful existences, ridden with disease and hunger, terrorized by tyranny and lawless violence, without hope that life will ever be any different for their children.

/>   If the depth and breadth of conflict in the inner life and the greater world do not move you, let this: death. Death is like a freight train in the future, heading toward us, closing the hours, second by second, between now and then. If we’re to live with any sense of satisfaction, we must engage life’s forces of antagonism before the train arrives.

  An artist intent on creating works of lasting quality comes to realize that life isn’t about subtle adjustments to stress, or hyper-conflicts of master criminals with stolen nuclear devices holding cities for ransom. Life is about the ultimate questions of finding love and self-worth, of bringing serenity to inner chaos, of the titanic social inequities everywhere around us, of time running out. Life is conflict. That is its nature. The writer must decide where and how to orchestrate this struggle.

  Complication Versus Complexity

  To complicate a story the writer builds conflict progressively to the end of the line. Difficult enough. But the task increases geometrically when we take story from mere complication to full complexity.

  Conflict may come, as we’ve seen, from any one, two, or all three of the levels of antagonism. To simply complicate a story means to place all conflict on only one of these three levels.

  From the Horror Film to Action/Adventure to Farce, action heroes face conflict only on the extra-personal level. James Bond, for example, has no inner conflicts, nor would we mistake his encounters with women as personal—they’re recreational.

  COMPLICATION:

  CONFLICT AT ONLY ONE LEVEL

  INNER CONFLICT — Stream of Consciousness

  PERSONAL CONFLICT — Soap Opera

  EXTRA-PERSONAL CONFLICT — Action/Adventure, Farce

  Complicated films share two hallmarks. The first is a large cast. If the writer restricts the protagonist to social conflict, he’ll need, as the advertising declares, “a cast of thousands.” James Bond faces arch-villains along with their minions, assassins, femmes fatale, and armies, plus helper characters and civilians needing rescue— more and more characters to build more and more powerful conflicts between Bond and society.

  Second, a complicated film needs multiple sets and locations. If the writer progresses via physical conflict, he must keep changing the environment. A Bond film might start in a Viennese opera house, then go to the Himalayas, across the Sahara Desert, under the polar ice cap, up to the moon, and down to Broadway, giving Bond more and more opportunities for fascinating feats of derring-do.

  Stories that are complicated only on the level of personal conflict are known as Soap Opera, an open-ended combination of Domestic Drama and Love Story in which every character in the story has an intimate relationship with every other character in the story—a multitude of family, friends, and lovers, all needing sets to house them: living rooms, bedrooms, offices, nightclubs, hospitals. Soap Opera characters have no inner or extra-personal conflicts. They suffer when they don’t get what they want, but because they’re either good people or bad, they rarely face true inner dilemmas. Society never intervenes in their air-conditioned worlds. If, for example, a murder should bring a detective, a representative of society, into the story, you can be certain that within a week this cop will have an intimate and personal relationship with every other character in the Soap.

  Stories that are complicated only on the level of inner conflict are not films, plays, or conventional novels. They’re prose works in the Stream of Consciousness genre, a verbalization of the inscape of thought and feeling. Again, a large cast. Even though we’re placed inside a single character, that character’s mind is populated with the memories and imaginings of everyone he has ever met or could hope to meet. What’s more, the density of imagery in the Stream of Consciousness work, such as NAKED LUNCH, is so intense that locations change, as it were, three or four times in a single sentence. A barrage of places and faces pours through the reader’s imagination, but these works are all on one, albeit richly subjective, level and, therefore, merely complicated.

  To achieve complexity the writer brings his characters into conflict on all three levels of life, often simultaneously. For example, the deceptively simple but complex writing of one of the most memorable events in any film for the last two decades: the French toast scene from KRAMER VS. KRAMER. This famous scene turns on a complex of three values: self-confidence, a child’s trust and esteem for his father, and domestic survival. As the scene begins, all three are at the positive charge.

  In the film’s first moments Kramer discovers his wife has left him and his son. He’s torn with an inner conflict that takes the form of doubts and fears that he’s in over his head versus a male arrogance telling him whatever women do is easy. As he opens the scene, however, he’s confident.

  Kramer has personal conflict. His son is hysterical, afraid he’ll starve without his mother to feed him. Kramer tries to calm his son, telling him not to worry, Mom will be back, but meantime it’ll be fun, like camping out. The child dries his eyes, trusting his father’s promises.

  Finally, Kramer has extra-personal conflict. The kitchen is an alien world, but he strolls into it as if he were a French chef.

  Perching his son on a stool, Kramer asks what he wants for breakfast and the kid says, “French toast.” Kramer takes a breath, pulls out a frying pan, pours in some grease, puts the pan on the stove, and turns the flame to high while he looks for ingredients. He knows French toast involves eggs, so he searches the refrigerator and finds some, but doesn’t know into what to break them. He rummages in the cupboard and comes down with a coffee mug that reads “Teddy.”

  The son sees the handwriting on the wall and warns Kramer that he’s seen his mother do this and she doesn’t use a mug. Kramer tells him it’ll work. He cracks the eggs. Some actually gets into the mug, the rest makes a gooey mess… and the child starts to cry.

  The grease starts to spatter in the frying pan and Kramer panics. It doesn’t occur to him to turn off the gas; instead, he engages in a race against time. He bangs more eggs into the mug, rushes back to the refrigerator, grabs a quart of milk, and slops it up and over the brim of the mug. He finds a butter knife to break up the yolks, making an even gooier mess. The child can see he is not going to eat this morning and cries his eyes out. The grease is now smoking in the pan.

  Kramer, desperate, angry, losing the fight to control his fears, grabs a slice of Wonder Bread, stares at it, and realizes it won’t fit in the mug. He folds it in half and stuffs it in, coming up with a dripping handful of soggy bread, yolk, and milk that he flings at the griddle, spattering and burning him and the child. He snatches the pan from the stove, scalding his hand, clutches his son’s arm, and pushes him through the door, saying, “We’ll go to a restaurant.”

  Kramer’s male arrogance is overwhelmed by his fears, his self-confidence turning positive to negative. He’s humiliated in front of his frightened child, whose trust and esteem turn positive to negative. He’s defeated by a seemingly animated kitchen, as blow by blow, eggs, grease, bread, milk, and pan send him stumbling out the door, turning domestic survival from positive to negative. With very little dialogue and the simple activity of a man trying to make breakfast for his son, the scene becomes one of the most memorable in film—a three-minute drama of a man in simultaneous conflict with the complexities of life.

  Unless it’s your ambition to write in the Action genres, Soap Opera, or Stream of Consciousness prose, my advice to most writers is to design relatively simple but complex stories. “Relatively simple” doesn’t mean simplistic. It means beautifully turned and told stories restrained by these two principles: Do not proliferate characters; do not multiply locations. Rather than hopscotching through time, space, and people, discipline yourself to a reasonably contained cast and world, while you concentrate on creating a rich complexity.

  Act Design

  As a symphony unfolds in three, four, or more movements, so story is told in movements called acts—the macro-structure of story.

  Beats, changing patterns of human behavi
or, build scenes. Ideally, every scene becomes a Turning Point in which the values at stake swing from the positive to the negative or the negative to the positive, creating significant but minor change in their lives. A series of scenes build a sequence that culminates in a scene that has a moderate impact on the characters, turning or changing values for better or worse to a greater degree than any scene. A series of sequences builds an act that climaxes in a scene that creates a major reversal in the characters’ lives, greater than any sequence accomplished.

  In the Poetics, Aristotle deduces that there is a relationship between the size of the story—how long it takes to read or perform—and the number of major Turning Points necessary to tell it: the longer the work, the more major reversals. In other words, in his polite way, Aristotle is pleading, “Please don’t bore us. Don’t make us sit for hours on those hard marble seats listening to choral chants and laments while nothing actually happens.”

  Following Aristotle’s principle: A story can be told in one act— a series of scenes that shape a few sequences that build up to one major reversal, ending the story. But if so, it must be brief. This is the prose short story, the one-act play, or the student or experimental film of perhaps five to twenty minutes.

  A story can be told in two acts: two major reversals and it’s over. But again it must be relatively brief: the sitcom, the novella, or hour-length plays such as Anthony Shaffer’s Black Comedy and August Strindberg’s Miss Julie.

  But when a story reaches a certain magnitude—the feature film, an hour-long TV episode, the full-length play, the novel— three acts is the minimum. Not because of an artificial convention, but to serve a profound purpose.