Story – part 3 (pages 201-300)

All these tips from Story really started to stack up by about P300. I knew I was going to finish and I knew I’d be better for it. However I still think that there is still a less tangible side from writing that comes from within. Mr McK states quite rightly about the importance of writing from the outside in but what about that vial of leaking stardust that spills pure creative Novocaine into our blood. What about creating a meme that will spread throughout your audience like wild fire. Yes as much as these fundamental rules need to be given respect i also rate individual style and talent as the real kicker that can carry a book simmering and bubbling above the myriad of stories… OK here is another round of superb ditties from the Page Python, turn on, tune in and drop out…

Extract: P212

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

Thus whilst 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.

Extract: P213

Life isn’t about master criminals with stolen nuclear devices holding cities to ransom. No life is about the ultimate questions of finding love and self worth, of bringing serenity to inner chaos, of the titanic social inequalities everywhere around us, of time running out. Life is conflict. That is nature. The writer’s challenge is how to orchestrate this struggle artfully, delicately, beautifully, ironically and with such aplomb and panache that the reader is left in state of enrichment.

Extract: P243

The understanding of how we create the audience’s emotional experience begins with the realisations that there are only two emotions – pleasure and pain. Each has it’s variations joy, love, happiness,  and anguish, dread, and terror to name a few. At it’s heart , we’ll lean life gives us only one or the other!

Extract: P254

How might we write a love scene? Let two people change a tire on a car. A textbook on how to fix a flat. “hand me the wrench. Don’t get dirty. Let me…whoops.’ However as their meet sparks fly it’s the unspoken thoughts that let us see through the surface. ‘He thinks she’s hot and she knows it.’

Extract: P255

We realize we cannot go around saying and doing what we’re actually thinking and feeling. If we all did that, life would be a lunatic asylum… In truth it’s virtually impossible for anyone, even the insane, to fully express what’s going on inside. No matter how much we wish to manifest our deepest feelings, they elude us. We never fully express the truth, for in fact we rarely know it… No text without a subtext.

Film Reference: Annie Hall

When Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) speaks directly to the audience “confessing” his fears and inadequacies, he also lies, dissembles, cajoles, exaggerates and rationalizes, all in a self-deceived effort to win us over and convince himself he is doing the right thing. Subtext is present even when a character is alone…

Definition: P259

Opening & Closing Value. At the end of the scene, examine the value-charged condition of the characters situation and describe it in the positive/negative terms. If the value has undergone change, then the scene has turned.

Extract: P288

The Inciting Incident is the Story’s most profound cause, and , therefore, the final effect, the Story Climax, should seeminevitable. The cement that binds them is the Spine, the protagonist’s deep desire to restore the balance of life.

Extract: P290

The alteration between tensions and relaxation is the pulse of living, the rhythm of days, even years. In some films it’s salient, in others subtle… each story speaks it’s natural accent, but never in flat, repetitious, passive non events, or in unrelenting, bludgeoning action.

Extract: P295

This is why we tend to tell stories about lawyers, doctors, warriors, politicians, scientists – people so positioned in society by profession that if something goes haywire in their private lives, the writer can expand the action into society. MY THOUGHTS: Perhaps the opposite with Fight Club; Normal office worker ant gets to make a huge change… neat… that’s got mass appeal.

Story summary – part 2 (pages 101-200)

On with the snake charmer and somethings are really scaring me, like all the things I kinda new I was missing from my novel but just couldn’t explain, comprehend until now… I especially mulled over the words on page 138, thought Donnie Darko  and American Beauty and thought yeah give the audience something that they figure out. That’s the magic moment, envisage. Pop corn on lap, you turn and give a knowing look to your friend; we’ve both figured this out and both know waht the other is thinking and no words have been spoken, awesome. Silverscreen telepathy of the audience if you will!!! OK enough jibber jabber fool, part 2 here we go.

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!

Story summary – part 1 (pages 1-100)

Found the first one hundred pages of the book OK, but part of me wanted to throw it over my shoulder like a whisky stained, fag burnt self help book, that’s just a sack of empty SFA. However every time I was about to throw in the towel out popped something; a little ray of sunshine if you will that cleared some cloud cover to some of the problems I’ve been circling in my own writing and before I knew it I’d turned another page and on we went… me and Mr McKee the guru, the snake charmer (oh I like that) and his story on Story. 

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.

Film Reference: This is where a direct film reference helps to give some perspective.

Extract:Page 12

Story isn’t a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality, our best effort to make sense out of the anarchy of our existence.

Extract: P 17

The writer shapes story around a perception of what’s worth living for, what’s worth dying for…

time to die...

Extract:P24

Truth is located behind, beyond, inside, below the surface of things, holding reality together or tearing it apart…

Extract:P31

From an instant to eternity, from the intracranial to the intergalactic, the life story of each and every character offers encyclopedic possibilities. The mark of a master is to select only a few moments but give us a lifetime.

 Definition: P34

A Story Event creates meaningful change in the life situation of a character that is expressed and experienced in terms of a value and ACHIEVED THROUGH CONFLICT.

Extract: P35

What value is at stake in my characters life at the start of the chapter.  Then turn to the end of the chapter and ask where is the value now? Has it flipped from positive to negative? If the value hasn’t changed then you should ask, why is this chapter in my book?

Extract: P65

Each tale you create says to the audience: “I believe life is like this.” Every moment must be filled with your passionate conviction or we smell a phony.

Film Reference:Dangerous Liaisons P83

Despite the antiquated setting, within minutes the audiance felt intimately at home with it’s corrupted aristocats – they are us!!!

Extract:P94

Given a certain conjunction of events, we too could part company with reality…. our toughest task in life is self-analysis as we try tofathom our humanity and bring peace to the wars within.

Extract & Definition: P95

The most important question we ask when we write a love story is what’s to stop them. Who are the blocking characters / forces.

Pages 100-200 next.

Story summary part 0

Ok I’ve just read Story by Robert McKee in preparation of either rehashing my existing unpublished novel Surface to Air or as scary as it is starting on a new novel from scratch….

When I was reading the book I stuck in a little coloured page marker whenever something made sense, gave me a lesson if you will or a moment of understanding perhaps clarity about what’s important in creating a Story that crackles with a life of it’s own and infects your audience in a way you’d never dared dream of.

My intent then is to create a series of posts under the categegory of Story in this blog that will become my summary of what I got out of Mr MG’s (as I’ll now refer to him) well reknowned book; Story – Substance, structure, style, and the principles of screenwriting.

I hope it works for both those readers that have both read his work and those that haven’t. To get your juices following here is a scene from the film Adaptation where the main character played by Nicholas Cage goes to an infamous Robert McKee seminar. It’s a brilliant little insight into writer, guru… hope you enjoy this and my coming posts on Story.

Dave. 

What format is best???

Well generally for me it’s novels, then films which on rare occasions (Fight Club) out shine the novel and lastly but by no means least, comics which on very rare occasions out shine my other two favourite formats. I’ve started to have this discussion with a couple of dudes at my place of work who like me love all of the above but not necessarily in this order. For Mr Comic Book Jesus (see my Blog Roll) it’s definitely comics first. Well I was trying to explain why I liked Ryu Murakami’s novel Piercing when i really didn’t dig the issue of Hellblazer given to me.  I sighted the gratuitous violence and torture on the first few pages of the issue of Hellblazer but the counter argument was that this was prevalent in Piercing…

So I stuck on my thinking cap and tried to analyse the difference these 3 different formats have upon the audience??? Well in the best traditions of a CAD Manager I drew a diagram to try to explain.

I guess what I’m saying is that because Ryu Murakami’s words were paced and laced with such a rhythm and specific detail that it left enough room for my imagination to fill in the gaps and exercise a built in level of graphic imagery and focus on the grisly parts that left me chilled but not repelled. The comic book on the other hand for me had a fixed piece of artwork that left little to the imagination and for me failed.

Bottom line I guess one format is not better than the other. It seems that film is often the medium for everone unless Hollywood butcher it and you are generally either a comic book or novel kinda guy or girl, a bit like penut butter or marmite lover! Then again some rare types like both with an equal passion. 

Personally it’s going to take a genius to get me raving about a comic, the artwork will have to blow me away page after page and give me just enough for me to want to fill in the gaps, whilst delivering a fantastic story and sharp super focused dialogue… Can such a comic exist? Well thankfully for me it does just check out Jonathan Hickman’s Nightly News.

Bottom line a great story can be destroyed or enhanced by what ever format it lives in and I guess which format hits the bullseye more often just depends on how your brain is wired.

Dave

This post was part inspired by my recent reading of Story by Robert McKee. I will post my ’summary of learning’ from that recent experience next…