44 pages • 1 hour read
Robert McKeeStory: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting
Nonfiction | Reference/Text Book | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3, Chapters 7-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “The Principles of Story Design”
Part 3, Chapter 7 Summary: “The Substance of Story”
This chapter seeks to outline and quantify exactly where stories come from. Unlike other art forms, McKee argues, story has no malleable raw material—it is intangible. The first section, “The Protagonist,” explains the role of the protagonist (including plural-protagonists and multiprotagonists) and what makes them engaging and empathetic to the audience. A protagonist must have will, a conscious desire (and perhaps a contradicting unconscious desire), a real chance of reaching their goal, and enough in common with the audience that we can see ourselves reflected in them. McKee further explores this idea in “The Audience Bond,” which discusses the concept of audience-character empathy.
“The First Step” and “The World of Character” begin breaking down how to create empathy for your character and build a story from their point of view. A character must make choices based on the information they have, and the result of those choices must be contrast with or contradict expectation. These choices are usually responses to conflict, which McKee divides into three levels: Inner, Personal, and Extra-personal Conflict. The disconnect between expectation and reality is what McKee calls “The Gap,” and it requires that the protagonist recalibrate their worldview.
“On Risk” and “The Gap in Progression” discuss how engaging stories give their characters something to lose as they make choices in pursuit of their goals. Each progressive choice comes with higher stakes, more risk, and more gaps between expectation and reality, until increasingly desperate choices lead to the story’s climax.
“Writing From the Inside Out” breaks down how to get inside the head of your character, which is the same process actors undertake as they learn to get into the heads of their characters on stage or screen. McKee uses a scene from Chinatown as an in-depth example of how to create an internal monologue to help understand your characters; he then breaks down the process in the section “Creating Within the Gap.” The chapter closes with “The Substance and Energy of Story,” which reiterates that the gap is “the source of energy in story” (179).
Part 3, Chapter 8 Summary: “The Inciting Incident”
The opening section, “The World of Story,” takes a more in-depth look at setting. McKee provides a detailed list of questions that a writer should be able to answer about their story world and their characters:
How do my characters make a living?
What are the politics of my world?
What are the rituals of my world?
What are the values in my world?
What is the genre or combination of genres?
What are the biographies of my characters?
What is the Backstory?
What is my cast design?
McKee pairs each question with an explanation of how to find the answers and why they matter to your work.
The next section, “Authorship,” highlights the keywords “author,” “authority,” and “authenticity.” The true author of a work has a “godlike knowledge of his subject, and the proof of his authorship is that his pages smack of authority” (185-86). The result of this authority is the effect of authenticity, regardless of the genre. Authenticity is not actuality or reality but rather a verisimilitude that feels true to the audience. The author cites the film Alien as an example.
“The Inciting Incident” introduces the first key event that launches the story into action. This is something that disrupts the balance of the protagonist’s life for good or for ill. The protagonist reacts, forms a new goal, and their choices power the events of the plot. The inciting incident may also awaken an unconscious desire that contrasts with or mirrors the conscious one. The next section, “The Spine of the Story,” explores this further by defining a story element called “the Spine,” which is the “unifying force that holds all other story elements together” (194).
“Design of the Inciting Incident” and “Locating the Inciting Incident” discuss how to develop the inciting incident of your story and why your entire story rests upon it, as well as how to balance inciting incidents for both central and subplots. Each of these incidents sets up a “dramatic question” that the writer, by unspoken contract with the audience, must answer before the lights go up. The inciting incident and the dramatic question should be established no later than 25% into the story. If the event occurs later than a few minutes into the story, that time should focus on subplots that each raise their own dramatic questions.
“The Quality of the Inciting Incident” and “Creating the Inciting Incident” explore how the inciting incident can be as violent as an explosion or as simple as toast being thrown into the trash, so long as it raises a dramatic question and inspires the protagonist toward a goal. The inciting incident takes your protagonist’s life to their best and worst possible limits. Once your inciting incident has propelled your story to its climax, your characters will find a new balance.
Part 3, Chapter 9 Summary: “Act Design”
“Progressive complications” explores the many ways to take your story from its inciting incident to the climax through multiple layers and sources of conflict. Each moment of conflict in the protagonist’s life is a “point of no return” where they must take a greater action than ever before to restore balance, at which point their action incites an even greater conflict. These complications accrue progressively throughout the narrative. The greatest turning points of choice, action, and new reality happen at the climax of each individual act.
McKee discusses how conflict, as a metaphor for life, is the driving force behind every successful story. In real life, the quantity of conflict we face is unchanging—when we resolve one conflict, another arises. The type of conflict, however, is constantly in flux. McKee explores this in the distinction of “complication versus complexity” (213). In a complicated plot, many problems arise on the same level of conflict: inner, personal, or extra-personal. A complex plot will have fewer individual problems, but they will be present at all three levels of conflict. McKee provides examples of each from popular films.
We then explore stories of varying lengths: one-act, two-act, three-act and so forth. Longer works may need balanced subplots to fill the stretches of time without a major turning point in the central plot and/or the space in a film’s opening before the inciting incident. Some of these major turning points may lead to a “false ending” before the true climax. When multiple subplots feature, the inciting incidents and other major turning points should be evenly spread throughout the story so as to hold the audience's attention. All subplots should also support the central plot, either through contrast or parallel, and should collectively enrich the controlling idea.
Part 3, Chapter 10 Summary: “Scene Design”
This chapter explores the four components of a scene, beginning with “Turning Points”—the moments when a character makes a choice in pursuit of their goal and causes an unexpected turn from positive to negative or negative to positive. This turning point sets up the new baseline for the next scene, which will turn this value around again. The turning points at the end of a scene sequence and at the end of an act will be more dynamic and extreme than any that precede them and will also give the audience a deeper understanding of all the turning points leading up to that moment. “Setups/Payoffs” takes this idea further and explains how setting up layers of knowledge for the audience to unravel prepares the audience for these turning points. This requires tact and subtlety so that the setups are clear enough to be remembered in retrospect but cautious enough not to give away the twists and turns of the plot.
“Emotional Transitions” defines the two basic human emotions: pain and pleasure. Everything else flows from these two opposing forces. Audiences experience these emotions when the story shifts from one value to another; however, these shifts cannot happen successively all in the same way. McKee calls this “The Law of Diminishing Returns”: the idea that our pleasure or pain diminishes through repeated exposure to an experience. This section also explores how manipulating feeling, or tone, in a scene can influence the types of emotions the audience experiences during the turning points.
The final section, “The Nature of Choice,” explores the idea that humans will always try to do what in their minds is the right thing, even when their choice seems wrong or evil to others. In a scene, choice is a dilemma between two conflicting positives or two conflicting negatives—either two good options that cannot exist harmoniously, or the lesser of two evil options. Each involves sacrifice.
Part 3, Chapters 7-10 Analysis
The first half of Part 3 focuses on the foundational construction of a story, beginning with the intangible “substance of story” from which we build our work. The author compares storytelling to other art forms such as sculpture and dance—forms that have a raw material (stone, the human body, etc.) that the artist can bend and shape. The opening to this section is somewhat contradictory in that McKee defines story as something undefinable and unquantifiable, though he spends more than 400 pages attempting to define and quantify it. Eventually he determines that the raw material of storytelling is what he calls the “Gap”: the space between expectation and reality where the truth of the story lies. By shaping and manipulating this gap into points of tension, we create worlds out of nothing. This is perhaps one of the weaker arguments in his work; many artists would argue that stone, paint, and other tangible materials are simply mediums through which to conduct their art, much like the writer uses paper and ink and computers as the medium for theirs. Drawing these comparisons, however, encourages the reader to examine their own ideas about the substance of art and where its true value lies.
The following chapters—“The Inciting Incident,” “Act Design,” and “Scene Design”—begin breaking down the mechanical pieces of the story medium. Before the first chapter actually defines the inciting incident, it lays out the groundwork in “The World of Story.” This further explores some of what McKee discussed in the chapter on setting—in particular, how essential it is to know your story’s world intimately and completely. This ties into the ideas of authorship, authority, and authenticity that the chapter presents, forming a layer of the book’s central theme: the responsibility to tell the truth through your story in the fullest and most authentic way possible—even when the truth isn’t quite the same as hard fact. McKee uses Alien’s worldbuilding as an example of a fully fleshed story. The purpose of the inciting incident is simply to effect a change that will immerse the audience in this world and begin the journey toward a new understanding.
The chapter also returns to the central thematic idea of core story archetypes and how the major universal story type threads the plot from the inciting incident to the climax. “Act Design” explores conflict and complications that run through this story archetype—what McKee calls the “Spine.” In addition to instructing how to incorporate conflict into a story, this chapter also explores the idea of constant and shifting conflict as a truth of life; to create conflict that is unrealistic, either in its exaggerated vulgarity or in its overly optimistic minimalism, is to be disloyal to the writer’s manifesto to tell the truth of life as we know it to be. This supports the theme of how mastery of the writer’s craft is inextricably tied to the writer’s responsibility to that craft and to the audience.
Finally, “Scene Design” focuses on the emotional dynamic of a scene caused by the choices, actions, and reactions of the characters. Engaging this emotion in the audience is to enter into an unspoken contract: “To tell a story is to make a promise: If you give me your concentration, I’ll give you surprise followed by the pleasure of discovering life, its pains and joys, at levels and in directions you have never imagined” (237). Here we again visit the theme of the storyteller’s responsibility to both the audience and to their craft. Very often the idea of a “promise” to the audience or reader is inherent in fiction writing. To create a dramatic question at the inciting incident is to promise that the question will be answered. To layer knowledge into a carefully constructed setup is to promise that there will be a satisfying payoff. To tell a story is to promise to tell the truth—maybe not the truth as we know it, but the truth nonetheless, to the best of our ability.
