Story Structure: Lessons That Have Stood the Test of Time
A trip back to my weekend with story guru Robert McKee
“Always choose feeling over logic.”
Hello Loreates!
I was cleaning out a cabinet to make space for (more) books the other day, when I discovered a time capsule from 1992: my notes and materials from the story structure course I took with Robert McKee while I was struggling with my first novel [and where I first met author Jennie Nash!]. The course was aimed at screenwriters, but I devoured every word and applied McKee’s lessons to rewriting my moribund novel, which sprang to life as Face and sold a few months later to Warner Books (now Grand Central). I credit McKee with helping me (like many others) to launch my career as a novelist.
I have written before about the most fundamental lessons I learned that day: how to turn a scene and how to raise story stakes. You can read those posts here:
But as I leaf through my bursting McKee notebook, I now find a host of additional insights that inform every story I write — whether fiction or nonfiction. Some of these rules have become second nature, while others will always be challenging. But no matter how seasoned you are as a writer, they’re all worth reviewing. The same goes for the charts McKee provided, like this one, which confoundingly incorporates his most essential lessons:
I’m going to try to deconstruct this chart and some of the other pointers that jumped out at me from my notes. At least one rule I’m going to save for another post, because it’s just too complex to fold in here; please let me know if you’d like me to further unpack any of the following in a separate post.
So, to misquote Shakespeare, Read on, MacDuff!
Aimee
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Robert’s Rules of Story
Beats are the micro building blocks of Scenes, which are the building blocks of Sequences that form Acts, which are the macro building blocks of Story.
