PDF Summary:Story, by Robert McKee

Stories are mysterious—like music, they have an emotional power over us that’s impossible to explain. However, screenwriter and storytelling expert Robert McKee argues that stories’ emotional power is not only explainable but also something you can learn to create. In Story, McKee breaks down how stories function and uses this theory to explain how you can write a gripping story. The book is intended for screenwriters, but its principles apply to any kind of storytelling.

In this guide, we’ll explain what ingredients enable stories to engage audiences on both an emotional and intellectual level. You’ll learn how “beats” of action and reaction act as the driving force of compelling scenes and how scenes, sequences, and acts fit together to form stories that hold attention. We’ll provide background from earlier works that likely inspired Story, such as Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces. We’ll also supplement McKee’s writing advice with tips from other popular books, such as Stephen King’s On Writing and Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat!

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Every Scene Ends With a Value Change

A series of beats in which a protagonist’s actions eventually cause one or more significant values to change is what McKee calls a scene. The scene is the smallest unit of storytelling that feels like a complete story. In Finding Nemo, one scene would be the events in which Marlin finds Nemo on his class trip, accidentally goads Nemo into swimming out to sea, and fails to save Nemo from being captured by a scuba diver. The value change of Marlin losing his son marks the end of the scene.

Alternatively, Pair Scenes With Sequels

As with beats, writers disagree on an exact definition of the word scene. One common and potentially useful definition comes from Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V. Swain. What Swain calls a scene is closer to what Mckee calls a beat—a protagonist has a goal, an obstacle arises, and something happens to prevent the protagonist from achieving their goal. However, Swain includes an idea that McKee doesn’t, arguing that every scene must be followed by a sequel—the protagonist has an emotional reaction to their new obstacle, contemplates their new situation, then decides on their next action.

While McKee does acknowledge the importance of having your characters react to unexpected obstacles, he doesn’t frame these sequels as an equally important counterpart to scenes themselves, as Swain does. That said, thinking of your story in terms of sequels may help you remember to spend more time on your characters’ thoughts and emotions. If written well, sequels like this help your audience better empathize with your protagonist (the first story ingredient), increasing your story’s emotional impact.

How to Intensify Your Story’s Meaning

We’ve defined the specific storytelling structure that gives any given event in your story meaning and emotion for your audience: A protagonist pursues a goal, encounters a series of unexpected obstacles, and causes their life to change. However, to increase the meaning and emotional impact of your story, McKee argues that you need to include two additional ingredients:

1. Escalating risk
2. Thematic coherence

Let’s discuss how to use each of these intensifiers to heighten your story’s meaning.

Intensifier #1: Escalating Risk

To heighten the meaningful impact of your story, McKee explains that you must force your protagonist to risk losing what they care about most in the pursuit of a valuable goal. Why? In life, we judge how valuable something is by how much we’re willing to risk or sacrifice for it. Thus, creating a protagonist who’s willing to risk everything they care about is the most direct way to make an audience feel like the protagonist’s actions are important and meaningful. In contrast, if your protagonist has nothing to lose, the story will feel boring and inconsequential.

(Shortform note: In Skin in the Game, Nassim Nicholas Taleb flips this idea, arguing that if you aren’t willing to risk something important in the pursuit of something valuable, you don’t actually value it, no matter what you claim. Taleb uses this idea to criticize those who claim to care about others solely to profit from a “virtuous” public image, for instance, a politician who claims to support egalitarian ideals to gain more political support.)

Furthermore, the pacing at which you escalate risk in your story is important: To make a story continuously interesting, you must incrementally heighten your protagonist’s risk over the course of the story, explains McKee. If the protagonist undertakes the same kinds of actions they took earlier in the story, the audience knows to expect the same kinds of results, and they’ll get bored. Instead, if you force your protagonist to take progressively riskier and more extreme actions, the audience knows that these actions will have new, interesting consequences, and they’ll be captivated.

(Shortform note: One easy strategy to naturally escalate risk in your story is to establish a ticking clock—a time limit that threatens specific consequences if your protagonist can’t accomplish their goal quickly enough. Screenwriters often include ticking clocks; for example, in The Matrix, Neo must rescue Morpheus in the simulation before Sentinels find and kill his body in the real world. With a ticking clock, your protagonist will believably take progressively riskier actions as they run out of time and become increasingly desperate.)

Story Beats Naturally Escalate Risk

McKee notes that the need for escalating risk is another reason why the beat is the basic unit of storytelling. When a protagonist’s action meets an unexpected reaction, it can escalate the risk of the protagonist’s actions in a believable way. It’s a fact of human nature that we want to claim our desires with as little risk or effort as possible. However, when the easiest, most obvious way for a protagonist to reach their goal doesn’t work, they must then try a more effortful, riskier action if they still want to reach it. After this happens enough times in a row, you’ll have believably built a story with high stakes.

For example, imagine a protagonist sees a child standing in the middle of a dangerous intersection. The protagonist yells at the child to get them to safety, but the child ignores them. This unexpected reaction forces the protagonist to take a riskier action—jump into the street and pull the child to safety.

Escalate Risk With a Character Arc

If you’ve used beats to slowly escalate the stakes of your story, but it still doesn’t feel like your protagonist has enough at risk, it may be because their goal isn’t important enough for them to believably risk everything to accomplish. If this is the case, you may need to switch your protagonist’s goal to something more important partway through the story.

This ties into the idea of a character arc—when the events of your story fundamentally change your protagonist. In many stories, the protagonist realizes that the goal they had at the beginning of the story is less important than they believed it to be, and they start pursuing a new goal that fulfills them more deeply. Then, they’re willing to sacrifice more to achieve this new goal, raising the story’s stakes. For example, in Mad Max: Fury Road, Max initially just wants to escape from slavery, but by the end of the story, he’s willing to risk death to save the lives of those he’s been traveling with.

McKee would likely argue that story beats that subvert expectations are the way to accomplish this kind of character transformation. By default, no one wants to change. However, because unexpected story beats cause the protagonist to learn more about the world than they knew before, you can use them to show your protagonist the truths necessary to spark their character change.

Intensifier #2: Thematic Coherence

In addition to escalating risk, for a story to have the most meaningful impact possible on an audience, it must feel like every part of the story is conveying the same meaning. This meaning is your story’s theme, which McKee calls a “controlling idea.” Although some may assume that constraining your story with a single theme limits its meaning, McKee insists that focusing on one central theme gives the audience a multitude of implications to consider. In contrast, trying to include multiple main ideas will muddle your story and hinder the audience in finding meaning.

(Shortform note: McKee advocates constructing your story around a theme to maximize the chance that the audience will find your story meaningful. However, your audience may interpret the theme differently than you intended. Many believe that a text’s inherent meaning overrides any intention on the author’s part, a theoretical framework known as anti-intentionalism. When you release a story into the world, you must accept the fact that it no longer fully belongs to you—audiences may use it to convey their own messages. That said, tightly structuring your story around a single idea as McKee suggests will arguably make it more difficult for audiences to misinterpret your intended theme.)

According to McKee, a theme is always a specific, truthful statement about the world that expresses cause and effect. This cause and effect will typically be the final value change of your story and the reason for that change. For example, the theme of Finding Nemo could be expressed as “Children live fulfilling lives when parents allow them to take risks.”

(Shortform note: McKee’s definition of theme is arguably more useful to writers than more common, broader definitions of theme. Vague, one-word themes like “family” may cause you to write a story that you think is thematically cohesive, but in reality isn’t saying anything concrete. For example, if you’re trying to write a story about “family,” you might write a scene about a family reunion and another about the birth of a child, but they don’t have anything to do with each other on a deeper level. In contrast, if your theme is “You achieve personal fulfillment when you make sacrifices for family,” you can immediately spot whether these two scenes are conveying the same cohesive meaning.)

All Value Changes Reflect Theme

How do you connect every scene in your story to a cohesive theme? Recall that to create meaning, every scene in your story ends with a value change of some kind. McKee explains that to create thematic coherence, every scene’s climactic value change should either prove the truth of your theme, or the opposite of your theme, which we’ll call the anti-theme.

Furthermore, McKee claims that your story should alternate between the two, so it seems to prove one idea, then its opposite, over and over until the climax, in which the theme definitively triumphs over the anti-theme. This uncertain tension between two contradictory ideas reflects the complexity of life in a far more believable, meaningful way than if you were to make every scene in your story prove the same point. This allows your story to convey a specific message without ever explicitly telling it to the audience.

For example, if the theme of Finding Nemo is “Children live fulfilling lives when parents allow them to take risks,” its anti-theme is equally present throughout the film: “Children irreversibly hurt themselves when parents are careless enough to put them in danger.” This is most obvious in the Act One climax, when Nemo is abducted, but it’s equally present every time obstacles arise between Marlin and Nemo. Scenes that make it seem like Marlin won’t be able to find Nemo serve as proof that Marlin should have been more protective of his son in the first place.

McKee’s Thematic Structure Is Dialectic

McKee’s concept of thematic storytelling is a form of dialectic—a pattern of reasoning with roots in ancient Greek philosophy. Persuasive writing, a group discussion, or a constructive debate are all expressible in dialectic form.

To present an idea as dialectic, you first establish a thesis—this is the popular opinion or basic assumption that most people have. Then, you challenge the thesis with an antithesis—one or more facts that contradict the thesis. Finally, you conclude with a synthesis—a new declaration of truth that takes the facts of both thesis and antithesis into account and resolves any contradictions. (In longer or more complex dialectic, you then challenge the synthesis with an additional antithesis and resolve that logic into a new synthesis until you’ve said everything you need to say.)

Because it’s a balanced, fair-minded dialogue, dialectic is a persuasive way to present any idea—which explains why McKee uses it as a powerful tool to express your story’s theme. However, this understanding of dialectic arguably contradicts one of McKee’s conclusions. If stories are dialectic, the theme revealed at your story’s climax will be a synthesis—rather than a theme triumphing over anti-theme, you’re left with a complex view of life arguing that both theme and anti-theme are true to a certain extent.

How to Structure a Story

We’ve established how stories generate meaning as well as what devices heighten that meaning (escalating risk and coherent theme). McKee argues that because they must include all these ingredients, all the most impactful stories follow a consistent pattern, or story structure.

The Key Parts of a Story: Climax and Inciting Incident

McKee argues that the most important scene in all stories is the climax: the final, most extreme, and irreversible change in your story. The climax of your story is the most meaningful scene and impacts the audience more intensely than any other scene because of the intensifiers we discussed in the previous section. The climax is where the protagonist risks the most and either succeeds or fails to achieve their goal. Additionally, the climax definitively “proves” your theme by revealing the ultimate consequences of all your protagonist’s actions.

To effectively create a meaningful climax, you also need to write a well-crafted inciting incident: a scene early in the story that creates the first major change in your protagonist’s life. This major change throws the protagonist’s life into chaos and uncertainty, causing them to take action toward the goal they believe will give them a predictable, desirable, normal life. This is the goal the protagonist will be chasing for the entire story, until the climax.

In short, your inciting incident raises the central question of your story, and the climax answers it. These two events form the core of your story. The inciting incident of Finding Nemo is when Nemo is kidnapped by a scuba diver, and the climax is when Marlin and Nemo are safely reunited.

Contrasting Western and Eastern Story Structures

Although McKee frames this story structure as universal, some argue that this structure is primarily a Western one, with roots in ancient Greece. For instance, many stories in China, Korea, and Japan follow a four-act structure called Kishōtenketsu, and they don’t include an inciting incident or climax as we typically think of them. You may be familiar with Kishōtenketsu from the anime films of Studio Ghibli, such as Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro, which typically follow this structure.

The focus of Kishōtenketsu stories is internal growth rather than external conflict. They often depict an ordinary time in their characters’ lives rather than a dramatic, life-changing turn of events. Thus, they don’t need an inciting incident that radically upsets the characters’ lives.

Similarly, there isn’t really a climax at the end of Kishōtenketsu stories. Although they sometimes end by resolving one of the characters’ main problems, this resolution is rarely intended to create a sense of closure or finality. Rather, it shows the audience the characters’ new normal—often the result of a subtle and incomplete character change—and hints at how their lives will continue from here on out.

Everything in Between: Scenes, Sequences, and Acts

McKee asserts that the parts of your story between the inciting incident and the climax follow a consistent pattern, too. This pattern builds on the means of creating meaning we’ve already discussed: In a scene, a protagonist pursues a goal, hits an obstacle that subverts their expectations, and causes something in their life to change. To write a full story, repeat this pattern at a big-picture level.

In other words, story is fractal: Just as beats build on one another to form a scene, McKee explains that scenes build on one another to form a sequence, which ends with a more significant change in your protagonist’s life than any single scene. Likewise, a series of sequences that leads to an extreme change is what McKee calls an act, and a very small handful of acts make up your whole story.

This design ensures that every single beat is contributing toward several consequential value changes: the next scene climax, sequence climax, and act climax. Therefore, every beat in every scene feels important, and your story’s beats feel progressively more important and meaningful as the sum of all your protagonist’s actions leads to bigger changes.

For example, Act Two of Finding Nemo involves a scene in which Marlin befriends a fish named Dory, creating a positive value change (gaining an ally). This scene-level value change (among others) helps Marlin achieve a larger sequence-level value change where Dory helps Marlin learn the address of his son’s kidnapper (gaining direction). This sequence (among others) helps Marlin successfully reach the dentist’s office where Nemo is being kept—only for Marlin to discover that his son Nemo is dead (or so he thinks) in a negative Second Act climax. Every decision Marlin makes in Act Two has directly led to this climactic value change (losing family)—if Marlin hadn’t befriended Dory, he wouldn’t have arrived at the dentist’s office.

McKee asserts that feature films need to have at least three acts to have the most meaningful impact on an audience: three extreme changes that turn your protagonist’s world upside down. You can include more than three acts if you’d like, but including fewer than three acts makes a movie feel incomplete.

(Shortform note: Although McKee argues that your story can have as many acts as it needs, many argue that all effective stories are told in no more than three acts. This idea was popularized by Syd Field in his book Screenplay, in which Field establishes the three acts of Setup, Confrontation, and Resolution. Aristotle also disagrees with McKee in Poetics, in which he argues that stories should have just two acts—before and after a tragedy occurs.)

Shortcut: Remove Everything You Can

McKee’s idea that every story beat should simultaneously contribute to several larger value changes may be more complex than it needs to be. There’s an easy way to tell if a story beat fails to fit into a larger structure—if you can remove a beat and the story still makes perfect sense, that beat doesn’t result in a change and thus isn’t contributing to the plot. This is because if a story beat causes a meaningful change, you’ll see that change later on in the story.

As long as you make sure your story has at least three significant, act-sized changes, and you’ve cut everything out of your story that doesn’t cause those changes, you’ll have a well-structured story. You can apply this same logic to scenes, sequences, and even entire acts, if necessary—remove anything that doesn’t contribute to a major change.

How to Write a Story

Now that we’ve explained how stories function, let’s describe specifically how to write a story. McKee details what he believes to be the ideal writing process: Begin with an outline, flesh it out into a treatment, then polish it into a final script. McKee frames this as a process for screenwriters, but you could apply it to stories in any medium.

Step #1: Create an Outline

McKee’s first step in writing a story is to create an outline: a detailed description of every one of your story beats and value changes. This outline is solely a description of plot and intentionally lacks dialogue or screenplay-style description. Since you’re essentially writing your entire story in outline form, this step will take up the majority of your time.

McKee recommends outlining many more scenes than you end up using. The way to find the best ideas is to write as many of them as possible, then select the very best and throw the rest away.

(Shortform note: The reason that writing more scenes than you need gives you the best ideas is that judging your ideas as you write them inhibits the parts of your brain necessary for creativity. If you plan on only writing one scene, you’ll be constantly judging it to make sure it’s good. However, if you plan on writing more scenes than you need, you can focus on being creative and judge your ideas later.)

Keep writing compelling scenes, fleshing out the world of your story, until you find a climax that strikes you deeply on an emotional level. This climax will reveal to you what the theme of your story is: your story’s final change and the cause behind that change. Then, you can start building your story backward. Since every beat in your story should support the climax logically and thematically, the climax gives you the direction you need to start solidifying the scenes, sequences, and acts of your story.

Once you have a complete story, McKee recommends pitching it to a friend. Tell them the entire story, beat by beat. Keep fine-tuning your outline until you have a story that reliably delivers an emotional impact on your listeners. This way, you don’t waste time fleshing out a story that doesn’t work.

(Shortform note: In On Writing, Stephen King recommends picking a single close friend or family member who will be the first to hear your story every time. According to King, when you imagine how this person will react to your story while you’re writing, you’ll be more likely to write something that resonates with them.)

You May Want to Skip the Outline

Contrary to McKee’s advice, many writers prefer to start the first draft of their stories without an outline. This is a process commonly known as “pantsing,” as in, “flying by the seat of your pants.” These writers find that they can discover better ideas by writing without knowing where the story is going. Moreover, they find that outlining their stories takes too much time up front and causes their stories to be more formulaic and predictable.

If “pantsing” feels more natural to you, or you’re having trouble establishing an outline, consider writing a full draft, then applying McKee’s story theory after the fact. Identify your existing story’s climax, theme, and act structure, then revise to ensure all these elements align in the next draft.

How to Write Compelling Scenes

We’ve covered what to do with scenes once you have them, but how do you come up with compelling scenes in the first place?

To create scenes that are true to life, you must create realistic beats. To do this, McKee recommends that you place your characters in a situation, then dive deep into your imagination to discover what you believe each character would authentically be thinking and feeling in that situation. Write down what action that character would honestly take.

Next, to make sure each beat advances your story, examine your scene objectively and imagine what could realistically happen that is the opposite of what your protagonist expects. Write this down, then return to the protagonist’s point of view and imagine their next move. Repeat until you reach a value change that marks the end of the scene. McKee asserts that this repeated oscillation between subjective and objective points of view is the key to writing compelling scenes.

McKee’s Process Fits the Way We Think

McKee’s scene-writing process makes sense when you consider how our brains work. In A Mind for Numbers, Barbara Oakley explains that throughout the day, your brain naturally switches between two modes of thinking: focused-mode thinking, when you concentrate on executing a logical task; and diffuse-mode thinking, when you relax and let your mind wander. Oakley claims that the most effective way to solve a problem is to alternate between these two modes, taking a break from an intense logical task whenever you feel like you’re getting stuck.

Arguably, McKee’s scene-writing process is effective in part because it forces you to constantly switch between these two modes of thought. It’s primarily a diffuse-mode activity—you imagine what it would feel like to be someone else and record whatever feels natural. Then, you switch to focused mode and determine what the next unexpected story beat could be. Because you’re constantly switching into diffuse mode, where it feels like there are no wrong answers, you’ll be less likely to feel stuck than if you were to constantly be racking your brain for the next logical plot event.

Step #2: Write a Treatment

McKee’s second step in writing a story is to turn your outline into a treatment: a more detailed description of each scene that takes care to outline both text and subtext. That is, you not only write in extreme detail what happens in each scene but also what each character is thinking and feeling—what’s truly motivating them. If you’re creating a story that’s true to life, this internal subtext will often contradict what the characters superficially appear to be doing. To return to our example from Finding Nemo, when Marlin shouts at Nemo, “You’re going to get stuck out there!” (text), he’s expressing, “I hope I can control Nemo by acting angry. I’m only doing this because I’m terrified something will happen to him” (subtext).

Because of this difference between text and subtext, you must write down both textual layers to ensure you fully understand what’s happening in your story in every scene. According to McKee, this is the purpose of a treatment.

(Shortform note: McKee recommends outlining your subtext as a diagnostic tool to ensure that everything in your scene is true to life. However, you can also intentionally inject subtext into a scene to make it more compelling, just by having your characters avoid saying what they really mean. Subtext makes a scene more compelling in two ways. First, it withholds information from the reader, generating curiosity. When the audience isn’t quite sure what your characters are really saying, it motivates them to look more deeply into your story. Second, subtext organically creates conflict. When characters avoid saying what they’re really feeling, it makes communication more difficult, which can escalate the tension in interpersonal relationships.)

Step #3: Finish Your Script

The last step in writing a story is to polish it into its final form, explains McKee. This is when you’ll add dialogue, scene description, and everything else that will end up in the final product. If you’ve extensively outlined your story’s plot and subtext in the previous two steps, writing dialogue will feel extremely easy and natural, since you deeply understand your characters as human beings.

(Shortform note: If dialogue still isn’t coming easily to you at this stage, there are many places you can look for inspiration. Pay closer attention to how the people you know in real life speak. Research specific dialects or technical jargon to give your characters a more authentic vocabulary. Study how the characters speak in your favorite stories.)

McKee notes that any one of these three steps may require extensive revision. You may fail to realize that your story doesn’t work until after you’re halfway through writing dialogue. In this case, McKee asserts that you must work up the courage to throw out anything that doesn’t work, no matter how much time you spent writing it. After you’ve done this, you’ll be left with a powerful, well-written story.

(Shortform note: This idea echoes the often-repeated writing advice to “kill your darlings”—in other words, revise any part of your story that doesn’t work for the audience, no matter how much you want to keep it in. If you’re struggling to work up the courage to cut a part of your story you’re in love with, try temporarily moving that passage aside (rather than cutting it). Knowing that you can always put the original passage back will often give you the peace of mind you need to write something new to replace it—which may be even better.)