Items in this part include: -
Extract: Pretty much a straight copy in the form of a golden nugget quote from the book.
Definition: One of Mr McKee’s little terms that helps cherry pick key components.
Extract: P101
True Character:These are the choices your character will make under extreme increasing pressure. The greater the pressure the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the characters essential nature.
Extract: P105
The function of Structure is to provide progressively building pressures that force characters into more and more difficult dilemmas where they must make more and more difficult risk-taking choices and actions, gradually revealing their true natures, even down to the unconscious self.
Extract: P111
Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion.
Extract: P115
The more beautifully you shape your work around one clear idea, the more meanings audiences will discover in your story…
Definition: P117
As a result of the climatic action, what valuepositively or negatively charged, is brought into the world of my protagonists? Ask yourself what is the chief cause or forceby which this value is brought into your story? The answer to these two questions is your CONTROLLING IDEA.
Extract: P122
The proof of your vision is not how well you can assert your controlling idea, but it’s victory over the enormously powerful forces that you array against it.
Extract: P138
The most memorable & fascinating characters tend not to only have a conscious but unconscious desire, Although these characters are unaware of their subconscious need the audience senses it.
Extract: P139
To interest us a character must have hope; if I love, if I win the lottery, if I discipline myself, if this, if that…
Extract: P145
Story should focus on the moment when the protagonist takes an action expecting a useful reaction but instead the action provokes forces of antagonism…
Definition: P177
Writing from the inside out; we do NOT imagine a scene from one end to the other locked in a single characters view. The writer shifts points of view and asks if i were this character in these circumstances what would I do?
Extract: P179
the substance of a story is the gap that splits open between what a human being expects to happen when he takes an action and what really happens.
Definition: P194
The Spine; Deep desire of the protagonist to restore balance to life. Each word, chapter, image is ultimately an aspect of the spine.
More from pages 201-300 next week!
