I don’t know how many people have ever heard of Robert McKee; I imagine all true cinephiles and cineasts have, but I hadn’t. For those as ignorant as me, here’s some of the dust-jacket copy from his book Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (which describes him as “the world’s premier screenwriting teacher”):
For more than thirteen years, Robert McKee’s students have been taking Hollywood’s top honors. His Story Structure seminar is the ultimate class for screenwriters and filmmakers, playing to packed auditoriums across the world and boasting more than 25,000 graduates. . . .Unlike other popular approaches to screenwriting, Story is about form, not formula.
I have to say, I’m honestly impressed. McKee shares my belief in the importance and power of story (if anything, he takes it too far; I get the sense that story has taken the place of religion for him), he’s all about teaching people to write good stories, and he has a lot of helpful advice and examples. (I had originally been thinking to quote a passage or two, but there’s too many good ones.) I don’t think he gets all the examples right, but most of them, he does—he really understands what he’s talking about; and while his book is focused strictly on screenwriting, so far, I think everything he says applies to anyone writing fiction in any form.I should note that one of the reasons I appreciate McKee’s work is that he doesn’t buy the pretensions of the artistes. Here’s what he has to say about the “art film”:
The avant-garde notion of writing outside the genres is naive. No one writes in a vacuum. After thousands of years of storytelling no story is so different that it has no similarity to anything else ever written. The ART FILM has become a traditional genre, divisible into two subgenres, Minimalism and Antistructure, each with its own complex of formal conventions of structure and cosmology. Like Historical Drama, the ART FILM is a supra-genre that embraces other basic genres: Love Story, Political Drama, and the like.
Being more of a novel guy than a film guy, I tend to run into this more with the art film’s prose cousin, literary fiction, where I’m regularly irritated by the pretensions of its practitioners and fans that lit fic isn’t a genre and is therefore superior to “genre fiction.” McKee’s right, this is naive; unfortunately, as B. R. Myers has pointed out in his “Reader’s Manifesto,” it’s a naivete that has led to some real distortions in people’s understanding and appreciation of literature. It’s good to have someone come out and say, “You know what? This kind of thing’s a genre just like any other, with its own conventions and expectations, and some of it’s good and some of it isn’t, just like any other genre.”Anyway, coming back to the book: it’s a very good book about writing stories, and I recommend it—especially to fellow aspiring writers, but not only.