Quotes from Robert McKee

A working imagination is research.

You may think you know, but you don't know you know until you can write it down. Research is not daydreaming. Explore your past, relive it, then write it down. In your head it's only memory, but written down it becomes working knowledge. Now with the bile of fear in your belly, write an honest, one-of-a-kind scene.

The difference is this: You're lonely when you have something to share but no one to share it with. You're lost when you have nothing to share, no matter with whom you live. Of course, you can be both lonely and lost, but of the two, lost inflicts the greater pain.

Difference for the sake of difference is as empty an achievement as slavishly following the commercial imperative. Write only what you believe.

an ending must be both "inevitable and unexpected.

Scholarly acumen sharpens taste and judgment, but we must never mistake criticism for art. Intellectual analysis, however heady, will not nourish the soul.

The weakest possible excuse to include anything in a story is: "But it actually happened." Everything happens; everything imaginable happens. Indeed, the unimaginable happens. But story is not life in actuality. Mere occurrence brings us nowhere near the truth. What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.

Thought can be controlled and manipulated, but emotion is willful and unpredictable.

Creativity is choice-making.

For those protagonists we tend to admire the most, the Inciting Incident arouses not only a conscious desire, but an unconscious one as well. These complex characters suffer intense inner battles because these two desire are in direct conflict with each other. No matter what the character consciously thinks he wants, the audience senses or realizes that deep inside he unconsciously wants the very opposite.

As Aristotle tells us: "For the purposes of [story] a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility.

Stanislavski called this the "Magic if …," the daydreamy hypothetical that floats through the mind, opening the door to the imagination where everything and anything seems possible.

Who are these characters? What do they want? Why do they want it? How do they go about getting it? What stops them? What are the consequences? Finding the answers to these grand questions and shaping them into story is our overwhelming creative task.

The PROTAGONIST has a conscious desire.

In storytelling, logic is retroactive.

The repetition of "serious" emotion is, in fact, a favorite comic device.

Hope, after all, is not unreasonable. It's simply hypothetical.

The dramatist is fascinated by the inner life, the passions and sins, madness and dreams of the human heart. But not the comedy writer. He fixes on the social life - the idiocy, arrogance, and brutality in society. The comedy writer singles out a particular institution that he feels has become encrusted with hypocrisy and folly, then goes on the attack. Often we can spot the social institution under assault by noting the film's title.

Do I bludgeon my brains against this wall or do I find some way to get through my days with value?

When a society cannot ridicule and criticize its institutions, it cannot laugh. The shortest book ever written would be the history of German humor, a culture that has suffered spells of paralyzing fear of authority. Comedy is at heart an angry, antisocial art. To solve the problem of weak comedy, therefore, the writer first asks: What am I angry about? He finds that aspect of society that heats his blood and goes on an assault.

The substance of story is the gap that splits open between what a human being expects to happen when he takes an action and what really does happen; the rift between expectation and result, probability and necessity. To build a scene, we constantly break open these breaches in reality.

As we know from life, decisions are far more difficult to make than actions are to take.

The substance of story is the gap that splits open between what a human being expects to happen when he takes an action and what really does happen; the rift between expectation and result, probability and necessity.

Designing story tests the maturity and insight of the writer, his knowledge of society, nature, and the human heart. Story demands both vivid imagination and powerful analytic thought. Self-expression is never an issue, for, wittingly or unwittingly, all stories, honest and dishonest, wise and foolish, faithfully mirror their maker, exposing his humanity … or lack of it.