Story robert mckee professional#

For half of my professional life I was a director and actor in the theater. I said “No, let’s put ‘screenwriting’ in the subtitle, but I’m going to call it Story.” I was hoping to get playwrights and novelists to understand that all the principles of story apply equally to them. In fact, when I wrote Story I had an argument with my publisher about the title. Everything I do from now on will be equally for storytelling in all these media. How is writing dialogue for these forms different?įrom now on, I am no longer writing simply for screenwriters and television writers. One aspect that sets Dialogue apart is it differentiates dialogue written for a screenplay, television and theater. My method is that I teach it first, I hear a lot of questions, and I research the answers to those questions, until I reach a point where I feel like I’ve heard every conceivable question and found the answers for them. Having taught dialogue in these online lessons and having answered questions from students, I got to a point where I felt that Dialogue was ready to go. I think talking about character requires a good deal of research into human nature, psychology, and relationships, so that kind of in-depth research slowed that subject down. The lessons in dialogue just seemed to evolve faster than the lessons on character. We created a website, and I put lessons on the website. The second book that I was writing – and I still am writing – is actually on character.

What made now the right time to write Dialogue? Over the last 20 years, your book Story has been incredibly successful and influential. In Dialogue, McKee delves into the concepts of what makes what characters say necessary or unnecessary, and it uses copious examples to demonstrate masterful ways of composing eloquent dialogue for characters, and, more importantly, audiences.Ĭreative Screenwriting spoke to McKee about what made Dialogue a necessary addition to McKee’s oeuvre, what role improvisation should – and shouldn’t – play in crafting dialogue, and why there’s no such thing as writing a screenplay without form. Like its predecessor, Dialogue focuses on the craft of writing, but as the title implies it focuses entirely on writing effective, believable dialogue for characters in all media. Nearly 20 years since the release of Story, McKee has published a follow-up, Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action for Page, Stage, and Screen. Countless writers we have interviewed at Creative Screenwriting have cited McKee’s course or methods as an influence on their work. He supplemented his course with his 1997 book Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, which remains one of the must-have bibles of screenwriting. In the early 1980s, the actor-turned-writer-turned-teacher launched his famed 3-day, 30-hour screenwriter courses, which he has since taught all over the world to over 50,000 students. Few teachers of screenwriting are as renowned as Robert McKee.