Story
Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting by infamous Robert McKee is certainly a big, fat screenplay book to swallow in one sitting. The book is just full of valid story ideas that needs to be contemplated over the period of time. The book is written like Mr. McKee is giving me a personal lecture on building stories, not just screenplays. I can understand why he is a famous in the circle of screenplay lectures.
However, I felt like he was going too far with his ideas, something like a professor who got his head too deep into his subject that he lost his pupils at the third slides in his lecture. The book started off pretty good, and easy, but when he began to discourse into finer things in his theories of storytelling, it got complicated. If his book did turn into a script, the movie would be too much of talking heads, instead of 'visualizing characters' motivations' as he puts in his book. I'm sure many people would favor his long and detailed discourse in storytelling, story structures, and etc. It does look like there's more meat to it than you can chew off. But essentially, it's not something you can digest, but a reference book AFTER you've finished your script. Yeah, it does look like how to analyze and breakdown a completed story rather than build a story from a ground up. Therefore, I think this book helps more development executives or producer types to analyze the scripts and 'develop' them, rather than novice writers looking to write scripts. I guess this insight does explain why it's popular in the Hollywood/screenplay lectures.
By all means, this book is helpful for all storytellers, full of ideas and informative analysis, so it merits a reading in my opinion. But I still don't think it's a bible--good reference book, for story creation like some other books I've read over the years. It could help writers to analyze their own scripts to mold into "Hollywood" vision/style, if you are planning to sell next Die Hard script or Bruce Almighty. (I know that I try. Heh.)
However, I felt like he was going too far with his ideas, something like a professor who got his head too deep into his subject that he lost his pupils at the third slides in his lecture. The book started off pretty good, and easy, but when he began to discourse into finer things in his theories of storytelling, it got complicated. If his book did turn into a script, the movie would be too much of talking heads, instead of 'visualizing characters' motivations' as he puts in his book. I'm sure many people would favor his long and detailed discourse in storytelling, story structures, and etc. It does look like there's more meat to it than you can chew off. But essentially, it's not something you can digest, but a reference book AFTER you've finished your script. Yeah, it does look like how to analyze and breakdown a completed story rather than build a story from a ground up. Therefore, I think this book helps more development executives or producer types to analyze the scripts and 'develop' them, rather than novice writers looking to write scripts. I guess this insight does explain why it's popular in the Hollywood/screenplay lectures.
By all means, this book is helpful for all storytellers, full of ideas and informative analysis, so it merits a reading in my opinion. But I still don't think it's a bible--good reference book, for story creation like some other books I've read over the years. It could help writers to analyze their own scripts to mold into "Hollywood" vision/style, if you are planning to sell next Die Hard script or Bruce Almighty. (I know that I try. Heh.)
posted by Calvin C. CHOI at
8:07 PM
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