Story Magazine // Issue 002

MCKEE

Story Magazine // Issue 002

 ROBERT MCKEE, A FULBRIGHT SCHOLAR,
IS THE MOST SOUGHT AFTER
SCREENWRITING LECTURER ON THE PLANET.
MCKEE He has dedicated the last 30 years to educating and mentoring screenwriters,
novelists, playwrights, poets, documentary makers, producers, and directors
internationally. Peter Jackson (writer/director The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy,
The Hobbit) has lauded him as “The Guru of Gurus.” For the writers of Pixar
(creators of Toy Story 1, 2, & 3, Finding Nemo), McKee’s STORY Seminar
is a rite of passage. Emmy Award-Winner Brian Cox also portrayed McKee
in the Oscar-nominated film Adaptation.

McKee’s former students include over 60
Academy Award Winners, 250 Academy
Award Nominees, 170 Emmy Award Win-
ners, 500+ Emmy Award Nominees, 30 WGA
(Writers Guild of America) Award Winners,
180+ WGA Award Nominees, and 26 DGA
(Directors Guild of America) Award Winners,
52+ DGA Award Nominees.A winner and
nominee of BAFTA for his popular Channel
Four series REEL SECRETS, McKee also
wrote and hosted 12 episodes of BBC’s FIL-
MWORKS series.He was profiled by Bob Si-
mon of 60 Minutes for CBS news.
McKee’s articles on Story have also ap-
peared in hundreds of newspapers and
magazines around the world includ-
ing Harvard Business Review, The Wall
Street Journal, Vanity Fair, The New York-
er Magazine, Swiss Business Magazine,
Sueddeutsche Zeitung, CBS Morning News,
BBC, Channel 4 in UK, RAI (Italy), CBN Week-
ly News & Morning Glory (China), MBC TV,
KBS & Arirang TV, Korea Times (South Ko-
rea), Kiev Weekly, Kultura Moscow, all major
TV, Radio and/or newspapers of Argentina,
Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile,
Colombia, Germany, France, India, Israel,
Mexico, New Zealand, Portugal, Russia, Tur-
key, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, and
Switzerland and given seminars in all of the
above countries.
Since 1984, more than 100,000 stu-
dents have taken McKee’s courses at
various cities around the world: Los
Angeles, New York, London, Paris,
Sydney, Toronto, Boston, San Francisco,
Helsinki, Oslo, Munich, Tel Aviv, Auckland,
Singapore, Madrid, Beijing, Shanghai, Bar-
celona, Lisbon, Malaga, Hamburg, Berlin,
Johannesburg, Rome, Stockholm, São
Paulo, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Bogo-
ta, Beijing, Brussels, Rio de Janeiro, Mos-
cow, Seoul, Istanbul, Hyderabad, Mexico
City and many cities regularly. Some no-
table writers, directors, and actors such
as Peter Jackson, Jane Campion, An-
drew Stanton, Geoffrey Rush, Paul Haggis,
Akiva Goldsman, William Goldman,
Joan Rivers, Meg Ryan, Rob Row, Da-
vid Bowie, Kirk Douglas, John Cleese,
Steve Pressfield, Russell Brand, and the
writers of Pixar to name a few, have tak-
en his seminar. McKee continues to be a
project consultant to major film and tele-
vision production companies such as
20th Century Fox, Disney, Paramount,
& MTV. In addition, Pixar, ABC, BBC,
Disney, Miramax, PBS, Nickelodeon, Par-
amount, GLOBOSAT, MNET and other
international TV and Film companies
regularly send their entire creative and
writing staffs to his lectures.

Story Magazine // Issue 002

FADE
IN:
WELCOME TO STORY MAGAZINE
Writing a novel or screenplay is easy, right?
Everyone seems to be working on one, so
it must be.
Anyone seriously involved in the task knows
how untrue this is. Writing a great story is
no easier than executing an open heart sur-
gery, but of course, we would never expect
anyone to pay us to do open heart surgery
until we’d undertaken the most solemn and
disciplined study of the task.
We want our heart surgeons to be (not only)
well-trained but we wouldn’t feel at ease
unless they had undergone a long mentor-
ship. We want them monitored, guided, and
coached to incrementally improve in their
craft.
It’s life and death, so we expect the highest
level of professionalism and exacting preci-
sion.
Why don’t we expect the same thing from
our storytellers?
“It’s not life and death,” is the easy answer.
Story Magazine // Issue 002
Or is it?
Do children not die every day because they
are bereft of a good story? Do we not con-
sume our way onto the heart surgeon’s ta-
ble because our story? Ask anyone that has
moved from an unhealthy state to a healthy
one and they will tell you the change came
only after changing their belief systems.
In other words, they heard and internalized
a better story.
Yes -- story is equally as important (if not
more so) than heart surgery. It’s every bit a
matter of life and death, but the substance
of an excellent story is more ephemeral than
the stuff of a well-executed heart surgery.
An expert versed in scientific knowledge
can predict day-to-day how a heart will re-
spond under the knife, but can a writer pre-
dict what will delight an audience and im-
prove a society?
There are no formulas, only forms.
And telling a great story -- one that reverses
our society’s inclination towards decadence
-- starts from the inside. Self knowledge is
the tool of all great writers, but who has the
FADE
IN:
time to develop self-knowledge anymore?
Who has time when there’s Twitter to up-
date, outrage to perpetuate, and elf-on-a-
shelf to play?
With all these distractions self-knowledge
can seem like a quaint relic of times past, but
this is just a surface sensation. Self-knowl-
edge is anything but passé. It’s the eternal
tool of great writers.
Even craft -- which we clearly love -- isn’t
an asset unless the writer begins from
self-knowledge.
IN THIS ISSUE
In a never-ending stream of tips and trick
(outside-in approach) we’re proud to repre-
sent the inside-out approach.
As Lowell Cauffiel tells in this issue, it’s al-
ways about the reader (or audience). We
write for them. Professional writers are not
solipsistic, which (as Cauffiel rightly points
out) is a mistake commonly made by am-
ateurs, but how do we write the truth for
them?
As Robert McKee points out in his article on
the Creation of Characters, we can never
truly know the mind of another. Still, we are
far more alike than we are different. Truth,
Story Magazine // Issue 002
for us, if we have self-knowledge, can be
expressed as truth for our audience.
Then craft becomes our greatest weapon,
but it starts from self-knowledge. The writers
featured in this issue have deep self-knowl-
edge.
We see this as Paul Haggis and Robert
McKee delve more into Haggis’s writing
mind. He shares the stories of creating his
masterpieces -- and he’s candid about his
struggles, too. For Haggis, a great story
starts when he identifies a question he’s un-
comfortable with. In Crash, it was the dis-
ingenuous ‘liberalism’ of Hollywood types
-- a group he identifies himself with.
He uncomfortably questioned his own rac-
ism and truthfully came to the conclusion
that he (even though he’s a liberal) was not
immune to this.
Our cover story this month, Margaret Nagle,
also starts her writing from self-knowledge,
and in discussion with her we learn how this
self-knowledge has guided her entire life.
She writes what she knows and in her own
voice, saying, “I only get in trouble when I
don’t write in my own voice.”
Even Ed Saxon’s feature on How Holly-
wood Works seems to echo the need for
self-knowledge. In this issue, he answers the
FADE
IN:

question, “When should I take my screen-
play into the world?” The answer is ‘when
it’s good enough’ to compete in an fierce
marketplace of ideas.
Do you really want to bring formulaic pab-
lum into this marketplace? It better be good,
and screenwriters had better take a stand
with their own unique voice in this market-
place.
Mastery by Robert Greene -- a book that
both de-motivates and motivates at the
same time, as we learn from Greene what it
takes to become a great master at anything.
It’s precious knowledge for the hard-work-
ing writer.
Thank you so much for coming along as we
continue to improve storytelling on Planet
Earth together.

On the topic of craft, we have two detailed

analyses by Robert McKee and one by Bas-
sim El Wakil.

Bass delves deeper into the core event of

principle genres -- why we need them, and
how to meet the expectations of an audi- Zander Robertson Matthew Lütz
ence. This is primary stuff -- we need to Editor-in-Chief Creative & Editorial Director

speak the language of our audience. Genre

is not a dirty word. In fact, it’s necessary to
payoff the audience’s expectations. Bass
teaches us how and shares relevant exam-
ples of how this is done in several recent
works.

Robert McKee continues in his series on

the 10 traits of faulty dialogue and (as men-
tioned above) introduces us to an ongoing
series on the creation of characters. This is
pure craft -- worthy weapons for the seri-
ous truth-telling writer.

In addition, Zander Robertson reviews

Story Magazine // Issue 002

CREDITS:

Zander Robertson
Editor-in-Chief

Matthew Lütz
Creative & Editorial Director

Mia Kim
Executive Editor

Robin Carey
Content Aggregator

Oliver Brown
Technical Manager

ZanderlütZ
Marketing Agency

Two Arts, Inc.

Publishing Partner

Story Magazine // Issue 002

 CONTENTS:
FEATURE: Margaret Nagle
In this exclusive interview, Margaret discusses
the writer’s journey, craft, finding your writer’s
voice, writing what you know, Sudanese
Refugees, her personal story, and more.
10 Traits of Faulty Dialogue (part 2)
In Part 2 of this on-going series, Robert
McKee goes into more detail about
Character Neutral Language, Ostentation,
Arid Speech, and Overstatement.
The Primacy of Story (part 2)
In Part 2 of this important series about the
deep meaning of story, Robert McKee
discusses the importance of truth to story
and identifies how the study of screenwriting
went into decay.
How Hollywood Works: When to
Take Your Script Into The World
In his ongoing series on the inner workings
of Hollywood, Ed Saxon discusses when a
script should move from the writer’s personal
folder to producers’ inboxes.
Creation of Characters
In the first part of an ongoing series, Robert
McKee introduces the study and craft of
character creation paying particular attention
to writing characters from the inside.
6 Principles of Professional Writing
(part 2)
Lowell Cauffiel shares the genesis of his
no-nonsense approach to professional
writing, as well as the second and third of the
6 principles or professional writing.
Story Magazine // Issue 002
London Screenwriter’s Festival
Interviews Robert McKee
Robert McKee recently sat down with the
London Screenwriter’s Festival to discuss the
future of screenwriting, television, and story.
Paul Haggis Interview with Robert
McKee (part 2)
Robert McKee and Paul Haggis discuss his
inside approach to screenwriting that’s led to
his success and multiple Academy Awards.
Genre Theory (Part 2)
In this second installment of a multi-part
series on genre, Bassim El Wakil explores
core events in more depth before discussing
the importance of understanding teleology.
Film Review: Coming Home
Robert McKee shares his thoughts on
Zhang Yimou’s flawless adaptation.
Film Review: The Imitation Game
Robert McKee gives his take on Graham
Moore’s extraordinary adaptation.
Book Review: Mastery
Zander Robertson reviews Robert Greene’s
powerful book Mastery.
2014 Alumni Success Stories
A year-in-review of some of McKee’s
students who have gone on to achieve
success within their respective industries.
Ask Robert McKee
Robert McKee answers a writer’s question
about narrative drive and pace.
CONTRIBUTORS:
Margaret Nagle
Margaret Nagle’s first screenplay Warm Springs earned
her a Writer’s Guild award for Long Form Original
Screenplay.

Ed Saxon
Ed Saxon produced Academy Award winning
Philadelphia and Silence of the Lambs along with 21
other films

Paul Haggis
Paul Haggis wrote Academy Award winning films Crash
and Million Dollar Baby along with several other feature
films.

London Screenwriter’s Festival

The London Screenwriters’ Festival is an annual
three day conference for screenwriters, which is run
by screenwriters, producers and filmmakers

Lowell Cauffiel
Lowell Cauffiel has been a newspaper and magazine
reporter, true-crime author, novelist, and screenwriter
during his long and successful career.

Bassim El Wakil
Bassim El Wakil is an action genre scholar and co-author
with Robert McKee of the upcoming book: Action: The
Art of Excitement.

Story Magazine // Issue 002

Many of the articles in Story Magazine are based on
lessons, interviews, and lectures given. As such, they may
not represent the author’s normal writing ‘voice’, but they
are always true to their word. This content isn’t available for
free anywhere – Enjoy your access to this private collection.

Story Magazine // Issue 002

LOWELL CAUFFIEL

THE 6 PRINCIPLES
OF PROFESSIONAL
WRITING PART 2
Lowell Cauffield left off Issue 1 with the first of the six professional principles.
Here he discusses the second and third professional principles.

Story Magazine // Issue 002

THE 6 PRINCIPLES
OF PROFESSIONAL
WRITING
INSPIRATION IS THE WRITER’S
WORST ENEMY
If you’re ever putting off doing a major home
improvement project like painting your entire
house, just start writing a novel or screen-
play, and you’ll have the house painted in a
week.
Inspiration to write doesn’t mean you will
actually write. It simply doesn’t work.
The best thing inspiration has done for most
writers I know is to help produce a few de-
cent ideas and some bad ones, too. Ideas
are cheap. Most professional writers I know
– including myself – are swimming in ideas.
I can’t get to them all.
There are several problems with inspiration.
First, it’s sporadic and short-lived. It’s more
of an emotion than a cognitive process.
Writing requires a lot of cognition, a lot of
thought and very little emotion. We may
have an emotional response to the things
we’re writing, but the act itself is a process
of thinking.
Second, inspiration threatens to feed the
compulsion to talk about your work or story.
It’s only natural. You’re excited and inspired
by your idea so you talk about it.
When I got my first book contract one of
Story Magazine // Issue 002
my mentors was Jack Olson, a New York
Times bestselling non-fiction writer. He nev-
er asked me what my story was about. I
started to tell him but he said, “Lowell, shut
up don’t talk about it.”
Don’t talk about your story.
Hemingway said of F. Scott Fitzgerald,
“His talent was as natural as the pattern
that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s
wings. At one time he understood it no more
than the butterfly did and he did not know
when it was brushed or marred. Later he
became conscious of his damaged wings
and of their construction and he learned to
think and could not fly any more because
the love of flight was gone and he could only
remember when it had been effortless.”
The same can be said when we talk about
our story. Repeatedly talking about the sto-
ry and its components takes away its mag-
ic because when you have to write it, when
the real work has to be done, it feels like old
news.
A friend of mine developed a system to cure
me of this. I had this habit of repeating my
stories over and over again, so he came up
with a system where he’d put up one fin-
ger if told a story once. If I told it twice he
THE 6 PRINCIPLES
OF PROFESSIONAL
WRITING
put up two fingers and so forth. Eventually,
I started thinking of those fingers whenever
I’d start talking about a scene I was working
on in a book or a screenplay I was writing.
It can be difficult to avoid talking about your
story because whenever you tell people
you’re a writer they immediately ask what
you’re working at. I hate that question. When
people ask me to tell them what my story is
about I tell them I don’t like to talk about it
until I’m done. I’ve been accused of being
arrogant more than once, but it doesn’t re-
ally matter because I’m the one that has to
write it just as you have to write your story.
That’s why I say inspiration is an enemy.
Jack London had a great take on inspira-
tion. He said, “You can’t wait for inspiration.
You have to go after it with a club.”
Sometimes you may not like what you come
back with but you have to do it. The club is
discipline, which is a scary word for a lot of
people. Nobody likes to be disciplined. We
think of our parents or teachers when the
word discipline comes up.
I have a different take on this.
One of my good friends, Loren, is 61 years
old and has written 75 books. When he fin-
ishes a book, he takes a day off and then
starts another book. He has a popular mys-
Story Magazine // Issue 002
tery series. He’s written westerns, and he
just put out a new book about the confes-
sions of Al Capone.
I called him on the phone the other day and
asked him the question about discipline in
his writing process in preparation for this
article.
It turns out he started writing when he was
14 years old and by the age of 15 had sold
his first short story to a magazine. He began
writing in a farmhouse built in 1867 that his
parents owned. His room was in the attic,
and in the summer it was 100 degrees up
there.
He’d be in his underwear at the typewriter,
sweat running down his face. When it was
winter it would be 20 degrees in his attic,
yet he’d be up there writing. He said you
could literally see his breath coming. Occa-
sionally, a phone call would come in or his
mother would call him down to dinner.
Of course, he didn’t want to go back up-
stairs after the phone call because it was
comfortable downstairs. He didn’t want to
go back up where it was freezing or hotter
than hell, so a couple of times he didn’t go
back upstairs, and on those rare occasions
he felt ashamed.
THE 6 PRINCIPLES
OF PROFESSIONAL
WRITING
His discipline was guilt enforced.
It reminds me of seat belts, which were
optional in some cars when I was in high
school. For a time, I prided myself in never
wearing a seatbelt. However, after seeing a
couple of bad accidents I decided to start
wearing a seatbelt. I wore a seatbelt for one
week and from that point on I couldn’t get
in a car that didn’t have a seatbelt. In other
words, I had developed a habit.
It was discipline enforced by fear.
Back when I was writing for a newspaper
I did a profile of a great hall of fame coach
for the Detroit Pistons. He told me a story
about Julius Irving. Dr. J, as he was known,
was one of the greatest basketball players
of all time, and he had a routine.
Dr. J always came to the locker room two
hours ahead of everybody else. His clothes
were always dry cleaned and hanging on a
certain hook. His shoes were unlaced and
he would spend the first fifteen minutes lac-
ing them up. He would lace the left shoe
first. Then he laced the right shoe with a
new pair of laces.
He would put on the shoes then go out onto
the court. He’d take thirty shots from the left
side of the court, and then he’d take thirty
Story Magazine // Issue 002
shots from the right side of the court. Next,
he’d take thirty shots from the top of the
key. Finally, he’d take shots from the free
throw line.
In other words, this system was the same ev-
ery day. It never varied and when the buzzer
went off, Doctor J’s shot was always there,
no matter what kind of day he was having,
whether he was having an argument with
his girlfriend, whether he was hung over, or
whatever the case would be. He’d had a
shot because he had a routine.
What do Dr. J, my friend Loren, and my
seatbelt story have in common?
Discipline.
What is discipline? It’s just a good habit. We
can all create bad habits, but we can also
create good habits. Instead of thinking of it
as discipline, I just think of it as creating the
habit of writing and I do that with a sched-
ule.
WRITE ON A SCHEDULE
This is the most important piece of advice
for any aspiring writer: have a schedule.
For me, I always write in the morning, first,
because our unconscious gets cleaned up
THE 6 PRINCIPLES
OF PROFESSIONAL
WRITING
through the act of dreaming. When we wake
up in the morning our unconscious is fresh
and ready to go.
All the crap that happens during the day
gets your mind cluttered up. You get things
on your mind and it makes writing horrible.
So, I get up early in the morning to write.
I first got into this habit when I was writing
my first book. I was working at the Detroit
News at the time. I had to work at the mag-
azine during the day, but I also had to write
my book, so I started getting up at 4 am
and writing from 4:30 am until 8 am. I’d get
my pages done and then go to work at the
newspaper. There are a million diversions,
but I got up early in the morning and wrote
fresh. Like Dr. J, I had the same routine ev-
ery day.
In addition to a schedule we also need a
quota. Different writers do it different ways.
I always have the same quota. I never write
less or more than my quota. The never more
part is the key because in the middle of
some days you’re so fully charged up and
inspired that you could crank out double.
My quota is five pages, but if I’m inspired
I might write ten pages. The problem is if I
write ten pages one day I’ll write only one
page the next day. I’ll write myself out.
Story Magazine // Issue 002
You always need to leave something for
the next days, so you can wake up the next
day knowing what demon you need to kill.
It takes away the questions, “How am I go-
ing to write today? What’s my first line?”
Any manner of such resistance is always
troublesome. No matter what you’re doing,
or whatever kind of writer you are, wheth-
er you’re a single mom or not, anybody
can write on a schedule. I know one author
who started in high school by writing for five
minutes before class. He was writing only a
paragraph a day, but over the course of a
year he wrote his first novel. He only wrote
for five minutes, but he did it every day.
The key is to do the same thing every day.
Everybody can spare a half an hour. This
time you schedule, this disciplined time, is
the secret. It’s holy. You don’t make appoint-
ments in that time. You don’t take phone
calls. You don’t talk to husbands or wives.
You don’t think about your girlfriend or boy-
friend breaking up with you. You can think
about that later. That scheduled time is for
your writing. This is where you pick up the
club that Jack London was talking about
and go find your inspiration.
So, unlike the friend I told you about in part
1 of this article series (the one that went
up to the cabin on the Au Sable River who
THE 6 PRINCIPLES
OF PROFESSIONAL
WRITING
couldn’t get anything written), I can write
no matter what. There are no perfect con-
ditions to write. There are only perfect hab-
its.
IT HAS LITTLE TO DO WITH YOU
AND EVERYTHING TO DO WITH THE
READER
This is a variation on ‘nobody cares about
your writing’.
It reminds me of when I used to go to these
writer’s groups where you get a half a doz-
en writers all sitting around, talking about
what they’re writing and reading each oth-
er’s pages.
There’s a kind of security in groups. It’s al-
most like AA meetings, where people spill
their guts. I’m not knocking AA because I
know it works for people, but in the writ-
er’s groups there were plenty of red flags
about what they were sharing. The biggest
red flag was people saying they needed to
write to express their soul.
Typically, these were the same people writ-
ing novels or poetry that no one had ever
seen. Their work was all piled up in a desk
drawer somewhere. It’s like the tree falling
in the forest that nobody hears.
Story Magazine // Issue 002
I would even say that the person hasn’t
even written because writing is a form of
communication and if you’re not commu-
nicating with anybody but yourself it’s mas-
turbation.
Professional writing is about entertaining, in-
spiring, educating, or compelling the read-
er. It’s not about you. My job is to identify
my audience and push those buttons on
the reader so they can have an experience.
How I’m feeling about it doesn’t have much
to do with it. One of our first jobs is to iden-
tify with people, places, things, and images
my audience can relate to.
Do you remember Steven Hawking’s book
A Brief History of Time? Everybody had this
book on their coffee table because it was a
sign that you were intellectual, that you’ve
read Stephen Hawking’s book.
There was a journalist that went into a bunch
of bookstores and put a self-addressed post
card in the middle of thousands of these
books. On the postcard it said, “if you get
this postcard, please drop it in a mailbox.”
He didn’t get a single postcard back.
Nobody read the book. They were just say-
ing they read the book to appear intellectu-
al, which brings up the point that you have
to write in a language that the reader can
THE 6 PRINCIPLES
OF PROFESSIONAL
WRITING
understand.
This is where most academic writing fails.
Academics write in their own language.
They write with their own terminology, and
they use tremendously long sentences. It’s
writing that would only ever be published
in an academic press. This kind of writing
would never survive in a market place be-
cause nobody would read it.
We have to resist the temptation to show off
in our writing. We have to resist the tempta-
tion to use excessive vocabulary and show
off excessively complex sentences.
We have to resist because it’s not about us.
It’s about the reader.
It’s not difficult to learn a complex vocabu-
lary. If I wanted I could write a 60-word sen-
tence that is properly punctuated and have
it make sense. But if the reader can’t read
it and if it slows the reader down then what
good is it?
Am I entertaining? Am I compelling? Am I
educating?
It’s not about me. It’s about the reader.
There’s this function in Microsoft Word to
measure what grade level you’re writing at
Story Magazine // Issue 002
from sixth grade to college. They show ex-
amples and the college level is equivalent
to an insurance policy – and they’re seem-
ingly proud of that. I wouldn’t be too proud
of writing an insurance policy.
When you run Hemingway through Mic-
rosoft Word it grants him sixth-grade level
writing.
It’s particularly true if you’re trying to express
difficult, elusive, high-arc type concepts into
writing that you can’t use complex high-arc
writing. The simpler the writing, the great-
er chance to get at some of those elusive
subjects.
Ernest Hemingway was, I think, the most
influential writer in modern American liter-
ature. His writing is so brave, so simple. In
Hills Like White Elephants there is a simple
scene with a couple sitting down, talking
about an abortion. It’s a simple back and
forth, yet it’s such a wonderful story. It tells
the deep emotional experience they’re both
going through.
It has little to do with you and everything
to do with the reader, so make it a point of
pride to make your writing readable. I al-
ways follow the rule I once heard from a
fellow writer: if it looks like writing, rewrite it.
CAUFFIEL

Novelist, Screenwriter, and Producer Lowell Cauffiel was born in

Michigan. An award-winning reporter with the Detroit News and
Detroit Monthly Magazine in the 1970s and 1980s, Cauffiel began
his book writing career in 1988 with “Masquerade: A True Story
of Seduction, Compulsion and Murder”. That title, and his 1997
New York Times bestseller “House of Secrets”, have appeared
on many critics’ lists of the best works in American true crime. As
a nonfiction author, he’s known for his meticulous research and
accuracy, delivered in novel-like, page-turner style.

Story Magazine // Issue 002

Stay tuned next month for the 3rd (and final) part of Lowell
Cauffiel’s 6 Principles of Professional writing, where he will
share the rest of his principles.

Story Magazine // Issue 002

Story Magazine // Issue 002
ROBERT MCKEE

THE PRIMACY
OF STORY PART 2

In Part 2 of this important series about the deep meaning of story,

Robert McKee discusses the importance of truth to story and identifies
how the study of screenwriting went into decay.

Story Magazine // Issue 002

THE PRIMACY
OF STORY
THE STORY RITUAL AS
ENTERTAINMENT
I ended last week’s article sharing the dis-
turbing trend of screenwriters that don’t take
their art seriously, denigrating it as, ‘just en-
tertainment.’
On one level I’d agree that it is just entertain-
ment, but then what is entertainment? En-
tertainment is coming into a theatre, open-
ing up a book, or turning on the TV and
going into the ritual of story, so that time
vanishes. You get absorbed in the work.
Suddenly, you look at your watch and say,
“Oh my God! That was three hours.”
Four, five, or six hundred pages fly by. Time
is erased. You’re being entertained as long
as you’re involved in the story, no matter
how tragic or dark.
From my point of view, Ingmar Bergman is
the most entertaining filmmaker I’ve ever
experienced. In fact, he had three personal
rules.
Rule number one was, ‘entertain the audi-
ence.’ He said, “There is no point in doing
this work if I do not entertain the audience.”
Rule number two was, “Never violate your
integrity as a writer.”
Rule number three was, “Treat every film as
if it is your last because it very well may be.”
Story Magazine // Issue 002
Bergman understood what entertainment
is, absorbing people into the ritual of story.
So, indeed it IS entertainment, but it isn’t
JUST entertainment.
All stories contain an idea wrapped inside
the emotional experience. An expressive
story brings about a new understanding of
change.
At the heart all stories express how and why
life changes in terms of whatever values are
at stake in the lives of the characters. Story
is about how and why life changes for bet-
ter or for worse. It’s always an expression
of change.
Change is the great terror. We’re cast into
this world, into time, and as long as things
don’t change, we’re safe. However, when
things change we’re in jeopardy. Have you
ever noticed that you dread doing things?
You put it off as long as you can. You finally
get up the guts and make the choice to fi-
nally take action and you finally find yourself
standing in the middle of that action think-
ing, “This isn’t so bad. Why did I put this off
for so long?”
Quitting smoking, for example, is not actu-
ally that hard. It’s the decision to quit that’s
excruciating. That’s the real difficulty. Once
you make that choice you will never smoke
again, and if you struggle to quit it means
you haven’t chosen to do it.
THE PRIMACY
OF STORY
At this point, it’s just something your con-
scious mind is nagging you about but that
you haven’t made the choice yet. If you had
made the choice you’d quit immediately.
Choice is what terrifies us. We would rather
live in uncomfortable status quo than face
change because at least we know how to
cope with the status quo. We’ve learned to
accommodate the status quo. Then again,
change could be brilliant. It could be the
best damn thing that has ever happened to
us.
It could also be tragic, and often the best
damn thing that ever happens to you be-
comes tragic. You meet someone and fall
in love. Great. That just opened the door
to hell, and we know that, which is why we
dread change.
Stories are always about change – how and
why life changes through time. So, the sto-
ryteller’s task is not to express life factually
but to make meaningful emotional sense of
life – even if that sense of that life is absurd.
An absurdist’s work is very meaningful.
This is all very important because story is
the greatest civilizing influence on Earth.
This has been known since Aristotle, who
famously said, “When the storytelling goes
bad in a society, the result is decadence.”
Decadence and corruption are the result
when you have weak, false storytelling in a
Story Magazine // Issue 002
society. I don’t mean corruption in the po-
litical sense, the criminal sense, or the reli-
gious sense of sinful or immoral. I mean it
in the original apple sense — rotten — life
rots. Life becomes inauthentic. It becomes
shallow and narrow.
People become insensitive as well as intel-
lectually and emotionally impoverished. A
decadent life is a mono, flattened, restrict-
ed, constricted, and emptied-out life. It be-
comes a life of ignorance, addiction, fanati-
cism, cruelty, greed or any other of the dark
forces that suck the humanity out of human
beings.
There is a dark force inside all of us, which
comes to life every time we rationalize do-
ing something we know will harm others or
ourselves.
We need storytellers. We need you. We
need honest, insightful storytelling to shine
a bright light into the dim corners of hu-
man nature and express the truth of what it
means to be a human being in this world.
It’s not enough just to express or explain
the truth. We must create story.
It’s easy to explain, but it takes genius and
creativity to create a story that persuades
and proves the truth of itself in performance
– without explanation.
As Aristotle said, “With respect to the re-
quirement of art, the probable impossible
THE PRIMACY
OF STORY
is always preferable to the improbable pos-
sible.” We want to create beautiful meta-
phors for life, whether factual or fantasy. As
writers we realize this. We’re not here just
to report the facts or explain life because
facts are not the truth.
Fact has no meaning. Fact is life, and life itself
is meaningless. It has no intrinsic meaning.
Truth is not fact. It’s not what happens. It’s
how and why it happens. And this is what
writers do. You take the facts and you look
deep into it with insight. You see beneath
the surface of human behavior to the real
forces deep down in human nature into the
real ‘how’ and ‘why’ human beings do the
things that they do.
Then you interpret that into a story to ex-
press the truth, knowing perfectly well that
another writer would express the truth in a
different way.
For example, there’s a fact in this world
called homelessness. In every big city in the
world, there is homelessness.
What’s the truth?
In the last presidential election cycle we
had Mitt Romney versus Obama. Romney
would say the truth of homelessness is that
it’s the homeless person’s fault. They went to
school and had a chance to educate them-
selves like everybody else. They could have
built a career or profession for themselves.
Story Magazine // Issue 002
Instead they chose drugs or alcohol, and
they’ve dumped themselves on the street.
Thus, it’s the homeless person’s fault.
Others, on the other side of the political spec-
trum would say it’s society’s fault. They’d
say we are not a compassionate society.
They’d say we’ve failed to confront the ob-
vious truth, which is that a certain percent-
age of human beings – no matter how edu-
cated or loved by their families – will not be
able to cope with reality and will be crushed.
We know for example that 1% of all human
beings at some point in their life go schizo-
phrenic. This has nothing to do with up-
bringing or culture it’s just a human thing.
1% of all human beings lose their minds at
some point in their life.
This means when I give my STORY seminar
with two hundred people that at least two
of them are hearing voices, none of which
are mine.
We don’t bother to shelter these poor souls.
Following Ronald Reagan’s lead we cast
them out of the asylum onto the streets,
rationalizing that they have their families to
take care of them even though that’s ab-
surd and cruel in the maximum.
Therefore homelessness is society’s fault.
Now, what’s the truth?
Is it the individual’s fault? Is it society’s fault?
What is the how and why of homelessness?
THE PRIMACY
OF STORY
The writer interprets the how and why and
builds it into a story to express that truth,
knowing that another writer could come
along, take the same subject, and create
a story that has the opposite meaning yet
would be just as true.
When we talk about truth we realize there
are points of view. There are many corners
of the circle of life. The truth depends on
the point of view, but the fascinating thing
about truth is that we always know when
we’re in the presence of truth. It matters not
if it’s a left wing truth or a right wing truth.
We know when something is true and we
know when something is a lie.
Indeed, the most life truths the storyteller
brings us are the bitter truths, which equip
us best to live our own lives.
The problem has become – and it’s the rea-
son I travel the world giving lectures on the
subject –that the quality of storytelling has
been eroded for the last 40 or more years.
There was a golden age of storytelling in
the 20th century from the 1920s through to
the 1960s or 70s.
It was fifty magnificent years of storytell-
ing. On screen it was magnificent, as cine-
ma dominated the 20th century, but it was
equally as magnificent with great plays and
great novels. The art of storytelling flour-
ished despite the depression, and despite
two world wars.
Story Magazine // Issue 002
Then, things started to erode for a lot of rea-
sons, one of which was education. Thanks
to the French, the education of the writer
shifted from creativity to criticism. Prior to
French theory and criticism, the study of
literature, theatre, film, and so forth was
taught from the inside out, from the point of
view of human desire, trying to somehow
get something positive out of life.
It was taught from the inside out, based
on a desire meeting forces of antagonism
building progressively to a moment of ab-
solutely irreversible change whether posi-
tive, positively ironic, negative, or negatively
ironic. That’s how it was understood until it
was reversed.
French Theory is an outside-in theory. All of
the variations of semiology – including in-
cluding Marxism, Feminism, Neo-Freudian-
ism, and so forth – are all extrinsic theories.
They all see it from the outside in, and they
view the work of art as a commodity. The
fundamental subtext of all of those theories
is that works of art are accidents. There are
artists, and they just do what their genes
have programmed them to do.
They make stories, art, films, paintings, and
music. However, they also make faucets,
automobiles, and plumbing supplies. All of
these things are commodities. The work of
art, therefore, is not important. What’s im-
portant is the explanation of the work of art.
It’s the critic’s interpretation of the work of
THE PRIMACY
OF STORY
art that actually makes it meaningful.
The work of art itself is just an accident.
I’m grateful I was born early enough to go
through the last of the intrinsic criticism,
and the teaching of creativity intrinsically,
before everything shifted in the 1960s be-
cause I can remember sitting in a class, be-
ing taught Shakespeare by a great English
(the nation not the subject) teacher named
G.B. Harrison. He taught at the Universi-
ty of Michigan and wrote a great book on
Shakespeare.
There was a student in the class the rest of
us called ‘Miss a priori’ because she would
always begin her comments with “Well, a
priori speaking…”
Miss A priori raised her hand one day and
started criticizing Hamlet. She found all
kinds of problems and holes in Hamlet. She
was going on and on about it until finally
G.B. Harrison said in his marvelous English
accent, “Young lady, enough, enough. You
do not judge Shakespeare. Shakespeare
judges you. You should read Hamlet once
a year on your birthday to see how much
you’ve grown as a human being, if any, in
the interim.”
That was how we used to think. We respect-
ed artists. We understood that they shed
light on life for us, that they created mean-
ingful emotional experience for us. They
Story Magazine // Issue 002
were telling us, teaching us, and showing
us what it is to be a human being. We used
to know that without these artists we would
be lost.
Then came criticism and theory, which
turned it all upside down. It made the pro-
fessor and the critic the stars, not the artist.
The critic could then stand on the shoul-
ders of the artist and demonstrate his bril-
liance and erudition by giving us theories.
He could deconstruct all the artists and in
the process disrespect art.
This led to a lot of young writers having no
respect for what they did. They began to
think of it as a scheme to make money or
be famous. It wasn’t serious to them. They
thought it didn’t matter and that it was just
a game.
Who can blame them?
They were taught so at university by profes-
sors who implicitly ridiculed art as a com-
modity, so that they could stand up and im-
press their students saying that they were
the genius and what Bergman did was just
a commodity.
See the next issue of Story Magazine for final part in Robert
McKee’s three part series On the Primacy of Story.

Story Magazine // Issue 002

 BOOK REVIEW:

MASTERY
Zander Robertson discusses why Mastery is
a book to inspire you to a new path of greatness
or fortify you on your existing path.

Mastery is a book to inspire you to a new
path of greatness or fortify you on your ex-
isting path. It’s a book that de-emphasizes
those aspects of the life of mastery that we
don’t control and re-emphasizes the ones
we do.
one working toward a great task by putting
our focus where it belongs. It’s a book that
teaches us to put the horse before the cart.
In our world of easy answers, ‘hacks’, and
shortcuts, Mastery is here to let us know
that nothing is new under the sun.

It’s a book that erases pretension in any- Malcolm Gladwell popularized the 10,000-

Story Magazine // Issue 002

BOOK
REVIEW:
MASTERY
hour benchmark to gain access to world-
class expertise. Robert Greene teaches us
that 10,000 hours might just be the begin-
ning. Indeed, for many of the masters he
studies in Mastery, new levels of skill and
brilliance were discovered at 20,000. Yes,
putting in the hours is required to achieve
mastery but alone it isn’t sufficient.
It all begins from a curious fascination for a
particular subject, which often appears at
an early age. The greatest masters heeded
those unconscious stirrings as children and
never stopped.
Did you know that our own Robert McKee
quenched his early thirst for stories by sneak-
ing into a local theatre and watching a dou-
ble feature three times per week? Watching
and analyzing six different films every week
for several years planted the early seeds for
McKee’s mastery. As he says in his inimita-
ble style, “The best thing my parents ever
did for me was not parent me.”
Did you know that Charles Darwin’s father
considered his son to be a dullard? In fact,
he urged the younger Darwin to enter the
clergy because he didn’t believe Charles
could do much of anything else.
The younger Darwin spent every free mo-
Story Magazine // Issue 002
ment in the fields of his native England,
collecting butterflies and staring intently at
blades of grass and flowers. His father mis-
took this for carefree stupidity, when in truth
it was the very source of his genius. Darwin
did what so few of us do: he disobeyed his
father and joined the H.M.S Beagle on a trip
to South America to collect exotic samples.
Robert Greene tells Darwin’s story [and
several more] in detail in this book. His his-
torical knowledge is what gives this book
its force, as he researched more than 200
books and conducted dozens of interviews
in preparation to write Mastery.
But ‘following your bliss’ is not enough. The
seeker must find an, ‘ideal mentorship’ and
learn under the tutelage of a senior master,
sometimes for years before achieving mas-
tery themselves. If a mentorship in person is
impossible, then the seeker must cultivate
a rich world of virtual mentorship, immers-
ing oneself in the minds of previous greats
through books and other media if available.
But mastery is not either a simple matter
of copying a previous great. The purpose
of the mentorship is to teach craft, but the
seeker will only know she has achieved
mastery when she gains spontaneity in her
work. The years long practice of craft help
BOOK
REVIEW:
MASTERY

the seeker develop freedom to innovate than now, under the magnifying glass of the
within the given field of study, practice, or Internet, which removes gatekeepers and
art form. balances out the playing field.

I am only touching on the surface of Greene’s
teachings and observations, here. Greene’s
genius is being able to break down com-
plex processes into easily understandable
components.
Perhaps most surprising of his observa-
tions is the one about the importance of
social intelligence. The lone genius working
at the keyboard, easel, or terminal is largely
a myth, he teaches.
While such people undoubtedly exist, it is
those who gain social intelligence that make
the greatest impact and eventually achieve
the greatest feats. In particular, he cites the
example of Benjamin Franklin, who was a
precocious genius that thought he could go
it alone before learning the hard way that
he’d need social intelligence to make his
mark in the world.
Perhaps you have a perfect practice of mas-
tery. If this applies to you then there is no
need to read this book. On the other hand,
if you’re like the rest of us that need a bit of
help understanding and seeking after the
best version of ourselves, then you should
by all means read this book.
Warning: this book is not inspirational. Don’t
read it to get a quick boost. Read it to gain a
deep understanding of what it takes. Read
it if you’re ready to commit to the long game
of mastery. The road is long but there is a
path, and there is no more important task
for an individual life.

This message is particularly important to to-

day’s seeker after mastery. With the crum-
bling and shifting of traditional gatekeeper
roles, how many new masters will benefit
from the adept use of social intelligence?
Surely this has never been more important

Story Magazine // Issue 002

Story Magazine // Issue 002
MCKEE
INTERVIEWS
PAUL HAGGIS PART 2

Robert McKee and highly successful Academy Award winning screenwriter

Paul Haggis sit down to discuss Haggis’s inside approach to screenwriting.

Story Magazine // Issue 002

MCKEE
INTERVIEWS
PAUL HAGGIS
ROBERT MCKEE: Were you raised catho-
lic?
PAUL HAGGIS: Unfortunately so. Yes, and the
nuns beat me regularly. There you go.
RM: I know, exactly. Ran away for a long
time, but you can never truly escape it. No,
there are things that you just—you want—
it’s not that you want answers, of course
we all seek answers, but I don’t think a film
is supposed to give answers. I think a film
is supposed to ask more and more trou-
bling questions until the audience comes
up with whatever answers they come up
with.
PH: Hey, we always want a film that has a point
of view, especially a political film has point of
view but if it’s done well, and I can’t say I’ve al-
ways done them well, but if it’s done well then
it should leave the audience with the thinking
that they’ve had answers, but in fact they’ve
had their own answers.
It was fascinating to me that many times peo-
ple have talked about Crash and the way that
they said that each character reached some
sort of resolution and has, you know, some
sort of redemption. None of those characters
are redeemed. Not one is actually redeemed.
RM: Even Matt Dillon?
Story Magazine // Issue 002
PH: No, because when he does something he
is a hero. But his job is to be a hero. That’s not a
big deal. He does heroic things all the time. You
know, what I wanted to do with each character
is give them a chance to have them glimpse
who they are. That’s it. And he glimpses who
he is through Tandi Newton’s eyes in the mo-
ment in that burning car, when this is a woman
who would rather burn to death than be saved
by him. Here’s a man who thinks of himself as
a hero, and in that moment this woman who
he’s supposed to save— that’s what heroes
do, they save women in distress that’s not a
big problem for him, but in that moment he
glimpses that this woman would rather die, be
burned alive than be saved by him.
Who is he? He has to ask himself that ques-
tion, who is he, who has he become. And that’s
what I tried to do with every question, every
person along the way, is give them a chance
to glimpse who they are. And then, we don’t
know what happens. Does Sandra Bullock in
the morning wake up and suddenly she’s much
nicer to her maid? I don’t think so.
RM: No, I don’t think so.
PH: I mean, not Sandra Bullock personally, I
mean her character. You know we don’t know,
so there is no moment in that in which peo-
ple – but you walk out of the theater thinking
that because you’ve created it in your own life.
You’ve had your own changes in your own life.
MCKEE
INTERVIEWS
PAUL HAGGIS
To this day I say, I don’t know if Crash— I didn’t
know if Crash was a screenplay when I wrote
it – an actual screenplay. I don’t know if it was
a movie when I shot it.
And I certainly don’t know if it’s a good movie
– I don’t even know if it’s a movie. But I know
it’s a good social experiment and that’s what I
want to do. I wanted to fuck with it. I wanted to
fuck with— no, no, no – I wanted to fuck with
people, and in order to do that I threw aside a
lot of things that I had learned.
I mean, I did nothing but explore, not explore
just throw you stereotypes for thirty minutes, I
threw them in your face. That’s not how you’re
supposed to do something. That’s not good
writing. You know? And I knew I was doing it
because I wanted to make you comfortable.
I wanted to sit you in the dark and say, “You
know what, I’m going to reinforce – just slowly
reinforce all the horrible things we think about
with each other, so it will make you comfort-
able, so you sit back and go, “You know what,
we all know Asians can’t drive, right?”
There’s no one sitting around here – in the dark
you can laugh. “And you know what, Hispan-
ics, they all park their cars on the lawn. I mean
who’re we kidding now?” And so you say,
you’re sitting around and going “I can laugh at
this, I am in the dark, I can laugh. Okay.”
And it makes you— it lets you relax, and lets
Story Magazine // Issue 002
you completely relax, and as soon as – 30 min-
utes in the film you’re completely relaxed, then
I’m going to start fucking with you, but if I tried
to challenge you right from the beginning? If I
tried to hit you with, you know— if every single
person who has a liberal point of view in that
and speaks out is full of shit. Every single per-
son, you know?
You know surely with Ludacris coming up and
saying this and this and this— the way peo-
ple—and you pull out guns! You know? You
know and if everybody, everyone who has a
liberal agenda turns out immediately it would
be proven so we can get back to our baser
instincts and feelings, that’s what I wanted to
do. And that’s what I set out to do and I think
so on that level it succeeds I think really well.
RM: It does. One of the reasons that I think
it succeeds is for a technical reason; which
is, how many story lines in Crash?
PH: I have no idea.
RM: Six?
PH: Could be six, nine, I don’t know.
RM: Could be six I think. I’m guessing –
PH: I think there are so many ones that spin off
it is hard to figure out where the story line is.
MCKEE
INTERVIEWS
PAUL HAGGIS
RM: But the ones that we follow and weave
I’m guessing about six, okay, let’s say.
When you wrote it did you have the transi-
tions from story to story to story back and
forth, weaving these half a dozen tales all
counter pointing and echoing each other?
I mean, that they are held together is the
great thing. But did you cut and weave the
stories in the script or in post-production?
PH: In the story, before I even got to the script.
They were all weaved together exactly like that
in the story. We then wrote it as a script…
RM: You wrote a treatment you mean, for
the story?
PH: For ourselves, yes— the treatment that we
wrote for ourselves– and I wrote it originally and
then Bobby and I put together and then in the
script. It’s all— if you read the script and you
see the movie, it’s largely the same thing. Now,
there are things that didn’t work when I shot
them, and therefore I had to change things. I
had to shorten things. There were things I re-
ally thought was brilliant writing which was just
dreck, which I had to get rid of— and then so if
I had to get rid of that then I needed to link these
stories together some other way, but yeah, no
it was always that way, because I wanted to
show the connectivity, and how we are all con-
nected so literally, when someone’s walking
out this door in the script. Ludacris is coming
out the door and he’s coming out left or right.
Story Magazine // Issue 002
You know, well he comes out immediately af-
ter the folks in the gun store have exited, right
to left, so I know— so I shot that based on the
script and then put together that way so that
everything seems to flow and if the camera is
here, he’s going left to right then the next one
was going left to right.
RM: That’s amazing because people like
Robert Altman who mastered the multi
plot and Babaloo Mandel his partner who
did the Parenthood— they said that they
just shot all these stories, then they go in
an editing room and then try to figure out.
PH: Wow, they’re brave people. We did, no,
Hughes [editor Hughes Winborne] and I did
have to do some work on it because we had to
get it down. We had to change things around,
and as I said some things didn’t work and we
had to reshoot things, and a day of reshoots,
two days of reshoots. So, thank God we had—
we had some insurance to cover some horri-
ble things that happened during the shoot. So,
I was able to pick up a couple of days but you
know I think— because unlike the one I just
finished writing, I constructed it completely dif-
ferently. I was curious.
RM: That’s only three stories.
PH: Yes, that’s only three stories and much
more difficult to do than the nine stories. Be-
cause one of the conceits in Crash – in the
MCKEE
INTERVIEWS
PAUL HAGGIS
story of Crash – is how we bump into each
other, and how we collide to each other. So as
I was coming up with this— this is long before
Bobby – this is as I was coming with it at night
sitting in my room alone at two o’clock in the
morning, I was thinking of these characters.
I’d start with this these two characters—I start-
ed with— I like to start with characters I dis-
agree with, people who I don’t understand,
that’s where I like to start. So, I started with
these two guys who jack my car. So, I started
with them. And I— so, I understood who they
were.
Okay, so I made them best friends, and then,
okay they go off and I ask, well, who did they
bump into? Well, they bumped into me and my
wife. What did we do? We went home. Okay,
who did we meet? Oh, we met the locksmith.
You know, and then I’d ask myself a question
like, “Okay Mr. Big Liberal, if the locksmith who
came that night was Hispanic and young and
looked like he had tattoos that in your ignorance
must be prison tattoos, and baggy pants, and
a white t-shirt would you have felt safe – you
know with him changing your locks?” I went—
I hate that question. It made me just— I hated
that question cause I wanted to say, “Of course,
of course,” but I went, “No, I don’t think I would
have. Something in me wouldn’t have.” I said,
“Ahhh, okay, now we’ve got a story.”
Okay, and then so I said okay— so we bumped
into the locksmith, where does he go? Well, he
Story Magazine // Issue 002
goes home. Who does he bump into? I keep
going. So, I just kept following the characters so
the story was developing as I went, and then I
went all the way through those characters and
I said, “Well—” and then I brought them back
around, I just kept bringing them back around
so that they had a natural connectivity and you
didn’t have to figure out if you’ve got three par-
allel stories how your going to cut from one
to the other. They followed. It’s a very different
way of constructing a story.
RM: Yeah, I see what you mean. I think
Luis Buñuel did a really bizarre version of
that in what’s it called, Phantom of Lib-
erty where you see this family. They have
a housemaid. The housemaid goes to the
dentist, she gets in the dental chair, they
start drilling, and then the dental assistant
goes and you never see this housemaid
again. Then you follow the dental assis-
tant out and she gets involved in some-
thing, and then you follow another charac-
ter and you never see the dental assistant
again, and they were all satires of bour-
geoisie behavior. Okay, so it’s all comedy,
and it’s all making fun of other people but
it’s just linking and you kept abandoning
character after character.
PH: I should have just abandoned them, but
I kept going around to see how connected—
they connected together, and Bobby and I did
a lot of work on how we’re going to bring them
MCKEE
INTERVIEWS
PAUL HAGGIS
back around— on how we were going to con-
nect them.
RM: Cause, you know it never felt forced. I
never felt like you were manipulating, and
then all those coincidences seem to be as
natural and a— I mean Bunuel— it’s clear
that it’s artificial. He’s playing some sort of
formal game with us, but I never felt that
with Crash. Now, the one you recently fin-
ished [Third Person] is three stories.
PH: Yes
RM: But they don’t intersect, they themat-
ically relate.
PH: They connect in a strange way, but not
physically. They don’t.
RM: Yeah, and this you think was harder
to write?
PH: Much harder. Much harder. That one was
hard because I had to know why I’ve got all
these three stories. What’s the purpose— and
etcetera? So— so that’s— and that starts with
a question, and it’s about—I start with— I like
to write about things I don’t understand, and
so I figured, oh, relationships! And, so I thought
I’d write about them, and then asking various
questions about various relationships that I
had had and the way I’ve treated people. And
so the questions if, you know, if you’re in love
Story Magazine // Issue 002
with somebody do you try to change them, or
do you accept them the way they are? And if
you do change them, do you change them into
someone you can no longer love?
RM: Exactly.
PH: You know? It’s like, do they walk all over
you if you just accept them? So, it’s all these—
these questions I was working out and depos-
iting characters in there.
RM: When you’re working on a character,
okay? A principal character. How much
life story do you— I mean there’s a differ-
ence life story, the whole biography and
back story, which are events in the past
that you are actually going to use in the
telling. But the whole…
PH: Almost no life story at all.
RM: No life story?
PH: Almost none. I like to have the characters
surprise me as I’m going through the story. And
then I often— I create backstory. I create things
that have happened to the characters as I go
through when I get to tough spots because I
truly believe, I think the mark of a poor writer is
you get to a problem, and you go, “Oh, no one
will notice,” and you go over the problem. And
you go, “No, that’s illogical.” I like to get to a
problem and I go, “Ooh, ooh, ooh.”
MCKEE
INTERVIEWS
PAUL HAGGIS
That’s an opportunity to explore. Okay, it makes
no sense what this character is doing right now
because it’s not motivated, but the character
has to do it. Okay, well, see that’s the won-
derful thing about characters, they contradict
themselves, right? No character does one
thing. We do things against our own interest
all the time. We do things that surprise peo-
ple. So, I said, “So okay, why? Why does this
character do this? Why does the character do
something that makes no sense story wise?”
Dig back into them, “Ah! Well, with their father,
with the thing, with this and this and this is why
they do that,” and you go, “Oh,” it becomes
much richer because of that.
RM: When you— I’ve heard this from fine
writers before, that you want the charac-
ters to surprise you.
PH: Yeah.
RM: Now, the characters are you.
PH: Mm hmm.
RM: The characters are out of their—
you’re the unconscious mind, or subcon-
scious mind, right? So, in a sense, you
know, you’re surprising yourself.
PH: Yeah, your subconscious is coming to the
fore, that’s what it is.
Story Magazine // Issue 002
RM: I’ve always— you know that— when
get to that old saw, “but my characters
talk to me? My characters told me where
they wanted to go?” I’ve always told writ-
ers, your characters are not talking to you.
You’re just having a little schizophrenic
episode.
PH: That’s exactly what it is.
RM: Right. Is it worth exploring this busi-
ness of character surprising? Or is it just
pointless to even worry about it, or think
about it? Let me put it to you in anoth-
er way: would there be anything that you
could do as a writer that would give more
opportunity, more surprises, that the char-
acters would really excite you or not? I
mean is there anything that you can do to
encourage that, “my character surprised
me,” process or incident?
PH: I don’t know. I mean, I always feel like I
should do more research and create more
back story and story for my characters, I just
don’t. I think I’m lazy that way, so, and I love
the surprise in the moment when a character
spits out something and I went, “Whoa, I didn’t
know that!” You know? “Wow!” And of course
you didn’t know it was coming, but in that mo-
ment, you know it’s— so, I don’t know the an-
swer to that question. I really,
RM: I don’t really know.
MCKEE
INTERVIEWS
PAUL HAGGIS
PH: That’s the fun part for me.
RM: Yeah, it is.
PH: And I guess I don’t want to take away the
fun part.
RM: Yeah. Yeah, I do think that you can
only create from what you know and so
as you’re observing life, and observing
your own humanity, reading newspapers
and gathering in life, it becomes the stuff
from which characters will grow and sur-
prise you. I mean ignorant people cannot
write, period. No matter what their talent.
PH: Yeah.
RM: But— and so the knowledge that’s
in you, is somehow part of this process.
I guess the only thing that you can count
on is if I just know more, pay more atten-
tion.
PH: Yup. Smart people don’t always make
good writers.
RM: No they don’t, no, no there’s talent..
PH: Plenty of people smarter than me.
RM: There’s talent. Let’s talk about char-
acter relationships. I’m really interested
in cast design, if that isn’t too big a word.
Story Magazine // Issue 002
The arrangement of relationships, how
one character develops another charac-
ter, you know, and when you are putting
a cast together, the thoughts you have
about relationships and how the charac-
ters service each other.
PH: Well, I don’t know how to answer that. I
do know that when I am writing, I try never to
think of actors. Many people do, and I don’t. I
think if you do, you’re doing an actor a disser-
vice and you’re ultimately doing the movie a
disservice. Because you will— can only write
for things you’ve seen that actor do before,
and so— and you want an actor to surprise
you. You want someone to bring something
different out, and so if you end up writing for
that actor, you’ll probably cast somebody else
and ah, so if you really want that actor, don’t
write for him. And actors I don’t think like it
either. I mean they like the idea, their ego is
stroked, the idea that you would write a movie
for them. But they want to stretch, they want to
do something different, they want to be chal-
lenged and go do parts they’ve never done be-
fore, and so— so I try never to do that. I don’t
know how to answer the rest of the question.
RM: Well I mean, you have a hero and a vil-
lain, or you have lovers. You have—start,
at the heart, two characters, okay? They
can’t be mirrors of each other, they can’t
echo each other, they’ve got to be two dif-
ferent people, and because character B is
MCKEE
INTERVIEWS
PAUL HAGGIS
the way character B is, character A has
to act a certain way, and character B then
has to act a certain way because charac-
ter A is a certain kind of person. So, that’s
what I am looking at, is when you are put-
ting character together, how do you think
about.
PH: I just think of them as obstacles.
RM: Obstacles?
PH: Yeah, I think that you have your initial char-
acter, and then everything around that charac-
ter is an obstacle to that character. For exam-
ple, it’s not an obvious obstacle. I mean, the
fact is – you’ll often find that in life – that you’ll
have the most tension with someone who ab-
solutely agrees with you. But they don’t agree
with you exactly the way you want to be agreed
with, [laughter] you know, and therefore you
have tension, and they are an obstacle to get-
ting what you want, which is understanding,
I suppose, at that moment. So yes, that is lit-
erally where I just place them in that way. And
whatever the character is trying to get, I put
people in the way to get there.
RM: You’ve written Bond Films…
PH: Yes.
RM: …and this character is, you know, tra-
ditional, he’s given to you, and I think the
Story Magazine // Issue 002
new Bond, Daniel Craig is maybe the best
of them all.
PH: He’s sensational.
RM: You think? You’ve got to create a vil-
lain for him.
PH: Right.
RM: Does Bond demand a villain, or does
the villain come from the world of villainy
and then you fit him in? I mean—
PH: Well, in this case I was given a script, and
then I rewrote that script. So, there was a vil-
lain already in place, and which was in place
from the book. And, you bring nuance to that
character, to that villain. You create a character
for that villain, but the villain, and the villainous
things the character is going to do – at least
the villainous intent – is already established.
So, you know, so much of the things— it’s fas-
cinating talking to you about this because so
many of the decisions I make are not analytical
decisions, I don’t know why I make those de-
cisions. I just do, as a writer.
RM: Well that’s the process you know that.
If it were just analytical, there would be no
art to it.
PH: Yeah, and so, so often, it’s only afterwards
when someone— either I or someone else an-
alyzes a script that I do— I go, “Oh ya, that’s
MCKEE
INTERVIEWS
PAUL HAGGIS

what I was going to do. Hey that’s why I was
doing it. Oh yes, and this was the tension be-
hind it, and that’s the theme, oh, I had a theme.
Wow, you know, I didn’t realize I had a theme.”
You know, because of course I did, but I nev-
er sat down and thought about it. Other times
I really sit down and think about it, you know
and say, “Okay, this is my theme, this is what
I’m trying to develop, and this is the questions
and the problems that I’m going to deal with
around that theme.”
But I’d love to, I mean, I guess if you have
enough craft over the years, and I was lucky
enough at it to work in television over a number
of years, etcetera, it becomes second nature
and turning a scene and knowing how to start a
scene, knowing how to end a scene, becomes
second nature, so— so where you had to first
study it, and then think about, apply it, and lat-
er on you just you don’t know why you start
the scene here or end the scene there or why
this villain is a certain way because it feels right
and when you haven’t got it right, you know,
you know. You know because nothing is hap-
pening. You know, the things that you want to
happen just aren’t, or the stakes aren’t high
enough. And so they have to change the villain
so the stakes are higher. Often what the villain
does, I mean the ending of Casino Royal, from
what I was handed and what I did, were com-
pletely different.
pletely different, even though in fact the major
villain had died by that point, but that didn’t
really matter. These faceless other villains took
over, and so the villainous intent was still intact,
and— but it wasn’t about besting the villains
in that case, it was about betrayal of someone
you love deeply, and how you’re going to deal
with that. How that villain inside of you, that
person who’s going to want to kill the person
that he loves and that he’s going to want to
save the person he loves, and then what he’s
going to do when that person decides she’s
going to kill herself. You know, so that’s what
I constructed out of that, when before it was
just what they’d given, handed me— was just,
“Chase the villains into a sinking house. Kill the
villains. End of story,” and the — Vesper was
already dead by that time.
RM: Yeah, so there was no choice.
PH: No
RM: None.

And so what the villain was doing was com-

Story Magazine // Issue 002

HAGGIS
Paul Haggis is the award-winning filmmaker
who, in 2006, became the first screenwriter
to write two Best Film Oscar winners back-to-
back with Million Dollar Baby and Crash. For
Crash, he won Academy Awards for Best Pic-
ture and Best Original Screenplay. The film also
received an additional four nominations includ-
ing one for Haggis’ direction. Crash reaped nu-
merous awards during its year of release from
associations such as the IFP Spirit Awards, the
Screen Actors Guild, and BAFTA.
In 2006, Haggis’ screenplays included the duo
of Clint Eastwood productions Flags of Our Fa-
thers and Letters from Iwo Jima, the latter earn-
ing him his third screenplay Oscar nomination.
He also helped pen Casino Royale, which gar-
Story Magazine // Issue 002
nered considerable acclaim for reinvigorating
the James Bond spy franchise.
In 2007, Haggis wrote, directed and produced
In the Valley of Elah for Warner Independent
Pictures, Samuels Media and Summit Enter-
tainment. The film, which starred Tommy Lee
Jones, Charlize Thero, and Susan Sarandon,
was a suspense drama of a father’s search for
his missing son, who is reported AWOL after
returning from Iraq. Jones earned a Best Actor
Oscar nomination for his performance in the film.
Haggis was born in London, Ontario, Canada
and moved to California in his early 20s. In ad-
dition to his work in feature films, he’s also writ-
ten extensively for television.
See issue 3 of Story Magazine for the continuation of
Robert McKee and Paul Haggis’s in-depth conversation
about the craft of screenwriting and Haggis’s inside-out
approach to the task.

Story Magazine // Issue 002

Story Magazine // Issue 002
 FILM REVIEW:

COMING
HOME
Robert McKee shares his thoughts on Zhang Yimou’s flawless adaptation.

One of the many beauties of the cinema
is its storytelling flexibility. The screen not
only takes its stories from the imaginations
of screenwriters, but it also recycles stories
that were first created by playwrights for the
theatre, researched by historians, reported
by journalists, or most frequently, written by
the authors of literature.
Stories created for the page demand a spe-
cial talent for retelling in film. And as Com-
ing Home once again demonstrates, Zhang
Yimou is one of the world’s most brilliant
conveyers of prose to the screen. In fact,
with one or two exceptions, the stories in
this master’s finest films have almost always
been adapted from novels:
• Red Sorghum (1987)
• Raise the Red Lantern (1991)
• The Story of Qiu Ju (1992)
• To Live (1994)

Story Magazine // Issue 002

COMING
HOME
• Shanghai Triad (1995)
• Keep Cool (1997)
• The Road Home (1999)
• Happy Times (2000)
• Curse of the Golden Flower (2006)
• Under the Hawthorn Tree (2010)
• The Flowers of War (2011)
• Coming Home (2014)
The critical problem of adapting novels to the
screen is this: The great power and beau-
ty of the novel is the dramatization of in-
ner conflicts, conscious and subconscious,
whereas, the great power and beauty of the
cinema is the dramatization of outer con-
flicts, social and physical. The expressivi-
ty of page and screen are at the opposite
ends of human experience.
On page, in either first, second, or third per-
son, a novelist can directly invade a char-
acter and use literary language to describe
and imitate the profound flow of thoughts
and emotions in the depths of the mind and
soul. But the camera cannot photograph
thought; the unseen life within a human
being can only be implied from images of
gestures, facial expressions, and tones of
voice, augmented and nuanced by images
within the setting, their lighting and colors.
Story Magazine // Issue 002
In other words, literary adaptations demand
superb acting to bring subtext to life within
the character and then superb directing to
house these performances within expres-
sive frames.
In Coming Home, Zhang Yimou placed the
characters played by Gong Li and Chen
Daoming in delicate, quiet compositions
of naturalistic rooms, hallways and streets.
Then he wrapped their faces in subtle, sen-
sitive light.
Trusting to Zhang’s vision, these two mag-
nificent actors brought their characters’
complex psychologies and inner turmoil to
life.
This combination of implied inner action and
expressive imagery gave the Coming Home
film audience what Geling Yan’s novel, The
Criminal Lu Yanshi, gave its readers: the
power to see with seemingly supernatural
vision through the surface behaviors of the
characters Lu and Yu to the wordless pas-
sions, confusions, and undying love within
them.
FEATURE INTERVIEW:

MARGARET
NAGLE
Story Magazine recently sat down with Margaret Nagle for an extensive interview.
We discussed the writer’s journey, craft, finding your writer’s voice, writing what
you know, Sudanese Refugees, her personal story, and much more.

Story Magazine // Issue 002

FEATURE:
MARGARET
NAGLE
In addition to what you will read below,
we will be sharing more excerpts of her
interview at www.StoryMagazine.media.
We found (unsurprisingly) Ms. Nagle
to be full of great insights. She’s lived
a full life and has earned every one of
her successes as a Hollywood screen-
writer along with many more to come.
She draws on this real life experience to
write world-class (and award winning)
screenplays.
In many ways, Nagle is the perfect writ-
er to be profiled in this magazine. She is
the kind of writer we should all strive to
be – hard working, committed to craft,
and determined to tell stories that mat-
ter.
Her latest film, The Good Lie – a survival
story of Sudanese Refugees – was not
an easy film for Hollywood to make, and
indeed it took over a decade to finally
be released. Yet, got it was made by a
combination of passion and luck. Nagle
continues to write great stories, draw-
ing on heart, craft, and her unique voice.
We were interested in the path that she
has taken, as it wasn’t always apparent
that she would be a successful profes-
sional writer. It was on this topic of her
crooked path where we started.
Story Magazine // Issue 002
MN: It’s a funny business that we’re in. It
doesn’t have a trajectory that makes a whole
lot of sense even to the writer sometimes.
It’s a weird, strange business to try and wrap
your head around and try to explain to any-
one. Even in an interview it’s hard because
it’s just a moment in time, and then there
will be a new moment in time for that writer,
and there may be all these potholes before
the next moment.
For example, I’m looking at the brilliant,
extraordinary writer Jane Anderson and
her work on Olive Kitteridge, for HBO, the
mini-series with Frances McDormand. The
writing is just exquisite and Jane is just an
exquisite writer.
And, she had the very first TV movie on
HBO. It starred Holly Hunter and was called
The Positively True Adventures of the Al-
leged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom.
It won the Emmy for best movie, and Jane
won every award in sight. And now here it
is something like 20 years later, and she’s
back but it’s not like she’s been writing a lot
in the last five or six years. She’s been very
quiet.
Then she emerges with this masterpiece of
adaptation (Olive Kitteridge). I was just lucky
enough to be reading the script, and I’m dy-
ing to say to Jane, “Where were you? What
was going on? Did you go write a novel?”
because the road is never straight in what
FEATURE:
MARGARET
NAGLE
we do. It’s a winding road. It’s a crooked
road. It’s a dead end. It has all these stops
and starts… and sometimes you have to
put down the pen and walk away for a while
and come back to it.
STORY: ‘The crooked path’ is fitting for
Nagle, considering her own crooked
path to becoming a professional writer.
She started out her career as an actor,
playing Ms. Chavatal on My So-Called
Life. It was there that Nagle received
the first inklings of her future career
as a writer, which came in the form
of words from series creator Winnie
Holzman, who first told Nagle she was
a writer-in-disguise. The signs were al-
ways there, though, she just couldn’t
always see them.
MN: I was working on My So-Called Life
and Winnie Holzman, who created the show
and has been a real mentor and dear friend
to me, she took me aside and said to me,
“You think like a writer. You think more like
a writer than an actor.”
And I’m a trained actor, and I love acting, al-
though I’ve always found something about
acting difficult, and it wasn’t the acting part.
It wasn’t the going on auditions part. It was
something about trying to understand the
material better. I always needed to under-
stand it more than other actors, and that
was really the writer in me trying to figure
Story Magazine // Issue 002
out the story.
I was trying to figure out how the charac-
ter fit into the story, and that wasn’t how
actors think. Actors think more like, “What
does my character want? And how is my
character going to get it?”
But me, I was thinking more like, “But the
subtext, and the opposite, and where do
we go here, and how does it fit into the
bigger piece?” and I didn’t have to worry
about that. There was always something
going on, which always got in the way of
my acting, because you can’t be thinking
all these things to be a good actor. Winnie
recognized that because she too had been
an actress.
STORY: Nagle went on to explain the
importance of female role models and
why she was unable to see the writer
earlier in her life.
MN: I think that now we see Tina Fey, and
we see Amy Poehler, and we see Mindie,
and there’s a whole generation of girls look-
ing at writing and Jillian Flynn and Diablo
Cody. There are role models, but when I
was a kid there was Lillian Hellman.
If I was up really late there would be tape
of her smoking and super bitter and all
hunched over on a talk show. I was like,
“Oh god. I don’t want to be that. I love her
FEATURE:
MARGARET
NAGLE
plays, but that’s just so ‘ewww.’” It didn’t
look in any way rewarding to a female. And
a lot of feminists believe, and rightly so, that,
and psychologists, that, “If you can’t see it,
you can’t be it.”
So, I didn’t think of being a writer. I thought
I’d be an actress and that would be my way
of saying the words and getting close to
text because I always loved text – loved it.
In eighth grade I was allowed to do an in-
dependent study project and I went and
looked at the books of musicals.
Now, what eighth grader goes and reads
the books of musicals for a project? That’s
what I did, and I thought, “Oh, that’s the
actor in me.” Even the people who write the
books of musicals don’t read the books of
musicals.
STORY: Winnie Holzman finally set her
straight, but Nagle still didn’t see it im-
mediately, thus her crooked path con-
tinued.
MN: So, what happened was, I then went
off and decided to be a producer because I
was just too afraid to write, and I did have all
these ideas for movies and TV, I just didn’t
know, I still wasn’t getting it. So, I spent five
years developing projects as a producer.
STORY: During her time as a produc-
er the not-so-subtle hints from other
Story Magazine // Issue 002
writers piled up. Nagle kept develop-
ing projects and not seeing the bigger
picture until finally a conversation with
a legend pushed her over the top.
MN: I had this idea to do a movie about Roo-
sevelt and his recovery from polio at Warm
Springs, and I went back to Mark Gordon
again because I knew him from [a previous]
project. And we went out and tried to get
a writer, producer, a director, anybody at-
tached, and we couldn’t.
We finally got a meeting with Lawrence Kas-
dan, who is a great director [The Big Chill],
also a really muscular, great screenwriter,
you know, he did The Raiders of the Lost
Ark.
I mean, he’s amazing, but he looked at me
and said, “I want to stop this meeting. We
need to stop. I want to talk to Margaret.”
Mark went outside to take a call, and Law-
rence Kasdan leaned forward to me and
said, “Why aren’t you writing this? You are
a writer.”
I sat and stared at him.
Then he said, “Are you in therapy?”
I said, “Yeah.”
And he said, “Well, fire your therapist imme-
diately because you’re a writer, and I can
FEATURE:
MARGARET
NAGLE
write this Warm Springs thing, but it won’t
change my life. If you write this, it’s going
to change your life. You need to stop ev-
erything. You need to tell Mark you’re writ-
ing it. He needs to give you money out of
the discretionary fund, and you need to go
home and write this movie right now.”
STORY: Nagle finally listened, and Warm
Springs went on to be nominated for
16 Emmy Awards. It won the Emmy for
Best Movie, and Nagle herself won the
Writer’s Guild award for Best Screen-
play for a TV movie. The meeting with
Kasdan was such a turning point that
Nagle’s friend Winnie even developed
a theory about why it was the turning
point.
MN: The night I won the Writer’s Guild
Award, Lawrence Kasdan was being giv-
en his Lifetime Achievement Award, which
was a funny irony, and he had no memory
of ever meeting me, or that he ever said
those things to me.”
[At this point, she breaks into joyous laugh-
ter.]
It was just the most awful thing. I thought
I’d tell the story and that he’d be so thrilled
that he’d helped change the course of my
life, but it was just the opposite. He didn’t
remember it at all.
Story Magazine // Issue 002
Winnie Holzman said to me, “Well, you know,
we all told you to be a writer, but that’s who
you listened to. So, maybe, you know, peo-
ple say that God will come and make an
appearance. So, maybe God came down
in the form of Lawrence Kasdan? And who
better to be cast for God? He has a beard.
He wears sandals. He’s got this Jesus thing
going on. Maybe he came down and it was
a miracle because everybody had told you
but you hadn’t done it.”
[More laughter.]
STORY: Her good humor about her
personal path as a writer is endearing.
There is a Buddhist-like non-attach-
ment in her coupled with a quiet confi-
dence and stick-to-itiveness. She lacks
the typical conceits about the writing
life, yet her crooked path has an inter-
nal logic to it. Even the side job she had
(selling bags) was integral to her jour-
ney.
MN: After the Lawrence Kasdan thing, I set
off to write Warm Springs, and that’s where
the selling the bags ended up being a gift
because that job paid for me to sit and take
as long as I needed. I made enough money
from that job to be able to take as long as I
needed to write Warm Springs.
STORY: It was also while selling bags
that she first came into contact with
FEATURE:
MARGARET
NAGLE
descendants of Sudanese refugees,
which first piqued her interest in the
Lost Boys’ plight. When the chance to
write a film about The Lost Boys came
up, she followed her intuition and pas-
sion to land a screenwriting job beyond
her qualification.
MN: I looked in Variety and saw that Bobby
Newmayer [producer of Training Day and
Sex, Lies, and Videotape] wanted to pro-
duce a movie about the Lost Boys of Su-
dan under his new producing deal at Par-
amount, and I went, “Oh, I know all about
those guys,” because my bag suppliers’
grandfathers were from the Sudan. They
had escaped the first genocide in the 50s.
[…]
I had been working with these guys for like
four or five years. They weren’t my only
suppliers, but they were my main suppliers.
I’d had them over for Thanksgiving. I knew
them well. Their kids’ pictures are still on
my fridge to this day.
[…]
So, when I heard about the movie, I went,
“Well, I know a lot about what it is to come
from Africa to the United States,” because
these guys and their families were like the
first Sudanese to come. I watched them
go through a really hard time and get de-
Story Magazine // Issue 002
pressed and feel alone. That was the thing:
there was a loneliness to their lives, and
that’s something you see in the film. There’s
this sequence where you see the loneliness
of being in America – the isolation of it.
So, I asked my agent if I could get in on the
project. There were so many writers going
in on the project – big writers – and he said,
“That’s not a first job I can get you.” So, I
told him to send in Warm Springs, and he
sent it in but no meeting materialized.
[At this time Warm Springs had been sold
to HBO but not yet made.]
Six weeks passed and I called my agent
again and told him I really wanted to go in
for this project because I just knew it was
right for me. I said, “What if I met the Devel-
opment Executive’s Assistant? Just get me
in the door.”
He tried again and eventually he called me
back and said he got me in.
In the mean time… many of my bag clients
worked for law firms, and what they’d do
was set me up at lunch in a conference room.
Women would come in and buy bags, men
would buy bags for their wives, and then I’d
leave after an hour.
So, LexisNexis is a search engine that lets
you pull up newspaper articles from around
FEATURE:
MARGARET
NAGLE
the world. So, what I did was, one of the law
firms let me come in and use their search
engine, it was too expensive and I couldn’t
afford it, but they let me use it for free. It’s
way beyond anything Google could ever pull
for you. And, I got every article ever written
about Sudan, the latest civil war, the Lost
Boys, the genocide, the politics, the histo-
ry, and I just created these ginormous bind-
ers filled with newspaper articles and I read
every single one straight through.
From that I wrote – not just a pitch – I wrote
an entire outline of the movie. I created the
characters and everything. I figured if I got
in I had only one shot, and they weren’t ex-
pecting me to pitch an entire movie but I
had to make the most of my one shot.
The more I learned the more I realized there
was something about me that really relat-
ed to these Lost Boys and Girls. There was
something in the way they thought that was
similar to the way I think.
So, I finally went into the meeting with this
executive at 10 in the morning and I pitched
him the entire movie – Huckleberry Finn and
every single detail that’s in the script, that’s
in the movie now, same names of charac-
ters, everything.
He just went, “Okay, I have to go get my
boss.” He went and got another executive
and said, “Just do for him what you did for
Story Magazine // Issue 002
me.”
So, I pitched it again, and they said, “Can
you hang around because Bobby Newmyer
is coming in?” So, he came in and I pitched
it to him and he burst into tears, and he
said, “I have to go to the airport and pick up
my parents. Can you just stay here? I want
my parents to hear this. I want them to be
a test audience.”
[…]
And they came in and by then the whole
office came in too. Everyone who worked
in the office came in. It was like 5:30. There
were like 15 people, and they all listened to
the pitch and they all cried and applauded
at the end. It was magical, and Bobby was
like, “Okay, so I have to go make a bunch
of calls. Just don’t go anywhere.”
Then I got a call from UTA saying I had to go
pitch it to a director who was attached and
another producer, so I went and pitched it
again. Finally, they took me to Paramount
and I pitched it to everyone at Paramount,
and I got the job.
It was scale + 10%, and I had to join the
Writer’s Guild, and all of that became really
important later when I went to get the film
back using the Writer’s Guild Reacquisition
Rule – five years after I’d done the last step
on it – and I was able to get it back and
FEATURE:
MARGARET
NAGLE
it was affordable because I had been paid
scale + 10% and because I was in the Guild
when I wrote it.
STORY: She got the job, but as she was
soon to learn, life happens. It happens
not only to writers but also to produc-
ers and executives.
MN: Well, first what happened was, Bob-
by Newmyer died. He dropped dead of a
heart attack in 2005, and that put it into
instant turnaround, and it was owned by
Paramount, then, and this is kind of weird
but – actually it’s water under the bridge,
but someone tried to get it out. When they
couldn’t, they tried to create a copycat proj-
ect, and that was nasty. And that copycat
project was with a writer that had travelled
with me doing research with me [for a book],
so it was very icky but stuff happens.
That project didn’t succeed, but it confused
Hollywood because they thought my proj-
ect was attached to his project but it wasn’t.
The producers never tried to clarify that it
wasn’t. It was very icky – a whole lot of icky.
So, anyway, I was able to get the script
back five years after my last paid step on it,
so now we’re in 2010 or 2011, and at that
point I was off on my writer’s career. It was
weird, though, because it came out on the
very first Blacklist. It was read by everyone
in town, and they’d say, “Oh, that’s such a
shame. That’s too bad,” so it was one of
Story Magazine // Issue 002
those things where my calling card was like
a grief card because people loved that pro-
ducer, Bobby Newmyer, he was so young,
he was 49. The script was so good, but it
couldn’t be let out. It was like going into a
meeting and having a grief card, but at the
same time Warm Springs got made, and
Warm Springs ended up being nominated
for sixteen Emmys and won the Emmy for
Best Movie, and I won the Writer’s Guild
Award.
[…]
When Bobby Newmyer died we were in
pre-production to make the film, and so the
whole thing came to a halt, but there is noth-
ing a writer needs more to move their career
along than having a movie made, that’s the
golden ticket. So, by not getting that made
it really just put me in kind of a weird limbo,
but then Warm Springs was made, so TV
came calling hard because of the sixteen
Emmy Award nominations and the Writer’s
Guild Award. Suddenly, all of the networks
wanted to give me a blind script to write a
pilot.
But, I’d been working through this whole
Lost Boys thing, but so what happened at
Paramount was that the executive heads
at Paramount changed three times in two
years. So, that combined with Bobby’s
death just put it into [a tailspin] – and so I
kept having to do more drafts for free for
FEATURE:
MARGARET
NAGLE
the new execs. So, I was exhausted work-
ing on this script.
See, right before Bobby died, he said to me,
“We’re going to have to fire you and get a
new writer that’s sexier to the studio be-
cause this new studio head doesn’t know
who you are, you’ve never had anything
made, and you’re not sexy to them. They
want to go get a fancy writer to do a pol-
ish, and they’ll maybe feel more confident
in making the film,” which is what happens
a lot.
I was so depressed. I was fired, and Bobby
Newmyer felt terrible about it. It’s funny, he
called me on Sunday to say, “Please don’t
hate me,” and I told him I didn’t hate him,
that I was just really mad at him, but that
I’d get over it. Then Monday the script was
on the Blacklist in the morning, then a few
hours later I got a call that he’d died. It was
on December 12th.
[…]
It was traumatizing and so devastating on
every level, and it was devastating to the
Lost Boys that had been – what we did
was use the film to create all this communi-
ty outreach, communication, and resourc-
es for the boys to be successful. We cre-
ated a scholarship fund, we got the center
for health to come and inoculate them for
certain things they’d been exposed to in
Story Magazine // Issue 002
Sudan that were dangerous and had never
been treated.
We’d been working closely with the boys
– not on the story because I’d already cre-
ated the story – but on relationships with
them and creating a scholarship fund so
they could further their education.
So, the boys were devastated, having lost
their fathers and mothers and families, to
then lose Bobby. They spoke at his funeral
and did the eulogy. It was horrible. Life just
takes these unexpected turns.
STORY: C’est la vie. Things happen and
a writer’s most prized work doesn’t get
made due to tragedy. What is a writer
to do?
MN: You gotta move on, and that’s a hard
thing to do as a writer when you’ve invested
all this time into a project. It’s hard to move
on. It’s hard to let go of that project, but you
do have to let go of it, and it doesn’t mean
you’re letting go of it forever, but you do
have to find a way to move on and kind of
clear your head.
You have to take away the sadness or bit-
terness or disappointment because you
don’t want to be taking that into the next
project. You really have to go reset and re-
boot completely and just really start over as
if the next thing is brand new.
FEATURE:
MARGARET
NAGLE
One of the mistakes writers make is they
bring in whatever their last failure was – emo-
tionally – into the development process, into
the notes giving process, the meeting pro-
cess, the development process on the next
project. That’s a dangerous thing to do for
a writer.
Actors do it too. They bring in their failure
with them. They bring in the 60 auditions
they didn’t get with them into the next au-
dition, and they could actually be on the
one they could get, but there is a negativity
about them. It’s not something you could
put your finger on, but it’s there, and writers
do it too.
When people are looking to hire a writer,
they’re looking to have a good time. They’re
looking to have a great time. They’re look-
ing to be inspired, themselves. They’re look-
ing to learn, to have you open their eyes.
They want all these things from a writer, so
it’s not good when you go in the room and
you’re assuming that person is the enemy,
or you’re all negative and deep and dark and
bitter from experience. You have to be able
to reset the dial and go into a new project
and let it be all new, and be open to it, so
you can bring in the best of you creatively
to it.
[…]
No one in a meeting wants to hear about
Story Magazine // Issue 002
how your last project didn’t work. Or, if it
did work, they don’t want to hear you crit-
icize it. They don’t want to hear anything
negative about anyone you worked with or
what went down because they immediate-
ly think, “Oh, that person is going to talk
about me like that, too.” These are import-
ant things for writers that don’t get taught
until after they happen.
STORY: Letting go was a common
theme in our conversation. Nagle also
stressed the need to write what you
know, which for her means tales of sur-
vivors.
MN: I’m always trying to answer the ques-
tion, ‘What is the value of a human life?’ I
realize that’s the question. That’s the ques-
tion I’m still trying to answer. I think I’ve an-
swered it with The Good Lie. I think it’s an-
swered, but, like this movie The Goree Girls
that’s supposed to shoot in the spring that
Christine Jeffs is going to direct, that’s about
survival. And, it’s completely different. It’s a
prison movie. It’s a country western movie
about a group of woman that created the
first country western band ever known in
jail, and they sang to get out of jail. They
sang for their lives.
There was a governor in Texas, for a short
period of time, named Pappy O’Daniel. He
was a character in Oh Brother, Where Art
Though? He’s quite a character, and there
FEATURE:
MARGARET
NAGLE
was a prison show in Huntsville where you
could sing before the electric chair on the
radio. If the governor liked you he would
pardon you, if he liked your singing.
And, at the female prison, the Goree State
Prison, they would listen to the show. The
show was a massive hit all over the world.
They [the Goree Girls] realized they need-
ed to get on that show because they were
being forcibly sterilized in jail so that they
couldn’t get pregnant and the guards could
rape them as much as they wanted.
So, there was a prisoner in there who could
sing, and she decided she’d teach every-
body to sing and put a group together and
get them on the radio and start to try to get
out of jail. Sure enough, she was right. The
show became – just when they thought it
couldn’t become a bigger hit, it became a
bigger hit. And they became a sensation.
[…]
So, the Goree Girls went on tour all over the
state. They were a huge draw. They made
a ton of money, but they still had to get out
of jail, which is what the film is about. The
script is based on a Texas Monthly piece
by Skip Hollingsworth, who is a phenom-
enal writer. So, that’s a survival tale, and I
was attracted to it for that very reason, and
Red Band Society is a survival tale. I think
I have to get off the survival tales, but you
Story Magazine // Issue 002
write what you know. That’s something that
gives a story a kind of momentum.
[…]
I write about survival, but I don’t try to live
that as a writer. My childhood was about
survival, and, you know, they should have
come in and taken us away from our par-
ents. I shouldn’t have had to do what I did,
but, you know, when you’re a kid, I mean,
I sort of knew that it was pretty fucked up,
but it’s interesting. Other adults, it makes
them very scared and uncomfortable to see
parents who can’t do their job, and I always
lived in very nice places with parents who
couldn’t do their job and refused to bring in
anybody else from the outside to do it be-
cause they had to protect their secrets.
So, you know, you’re really on your own,
but then I discovered once I was out of the
house and off to school I could get a lot
out of various situations. I realized I could
stay after school and do every activity so
I would get home really late, and I could
figure out how to walk to school or get my
bike to school. You know, you learn early to
do these things and be very independent
for the sake of your survival, but you know,
that’s not such a bad thing.
It’s like, I was trying to get Ger to my house,
and he wanted to take public transporta-
tion.
FEATURE:
MARGARET
NAGLE
Note: Ger Duany is the real life Lost Boy
who played Jeremiah in The Good Lie.
And he was like, “Oh, I can walk from here.”
And I said, “No, you cannot get off the train in
Culver City and walk five miles to my house
in the dark. I’m coming to pick you up.” Of
course, I’m talking to a Lost Boy. Walking is
always an option.
STORY: There is a bond between Nagle
and the Lost Boys, a shared understand-
ing of survival, which they expressed
to her when she shared the story she’d
written with a group of Lost Boys long
before the film was ever made.
MN: I pitched them the movie from start to
finish, which took about 45 minutes, just to
have them sign off, talk to their communi-
ty, and sign off on what the movie was, so
they all felt that the movie represented their
story. So, I pitched them the movie, and I
finished the pitch, and knew that the big-
gest issue was going to be the ending, that
would be the issue.
I’d done so much work and so much re-
search that I really do know them well, for
someone from the outside, put it that way. I
have a sense of it. So, I pitched it to them,
right down to the ending, and there was just
complete silence. And they said, the lead-
er, you know they had a designated leader
for this section, said, “All right. Thank you.
Story Magazine // Issue 002
We’re going to talk about it amongst our-
selves. Why don’t you guys leave and we’ll
call you back.”
It’s in their culture that they have tribal meet-
ings, and sometimes they will sit and talk
for two days, in a meeting about some-
thing. They walk a very long distance and
they meet, and they sit down and they have
these tribal councils. So, we left, and that
was probably two in the afternoon. Well, it
just went on and on and on, the silence,
and it got to seven, then eight.
[…]
So, they finally brought me in and sat me
down and I thought, “Oh boy, I’m in trou-
ble,” and the leader sat forward and said, “I
have one question.”
And, I said, “You can have a hundred ques-
tions.”
And he said, “No, I only have one… How
did you know?”
I said, “Because I know. I get this.”
STORY: A powerful moment, and a great
testimonial if there has ever been one
for ‘writing what you know,’ but Nagle
also stressed the necessity for screen-
writers to find and write in a unique
voice to ultimately make a mark and
FEATURE:
MARGARET
NAGLE
separate oneself from the crowd.
MN: You want to make your characters sort
of explode on the page, too, and make their
mark. And if you’re making them sound like
everybody else, or make them homoge-
nized, you’re going to lose. People aren’t
going to pay attention to your spec.
It’s just funny. When people write specs that
are, you know, like everybody else, they’re
betraying themselves because what you
want to put out into the world is a voice.
You’re saying, “This is my voice. This is how
I take on Warm Springs. This is where I take
the story. This is what I see as important to
this story.”
This is where you have liftoff. The script
[Warm Springs] opens and he’s [F.D. Roo-
sevelt] floundering in the water and then he
pees in a coffee can on a boat, and he’s
drinking, and he’s got stubble, and he’s
just a mess, and you’re wondering who the
hell this guy is. That’s what he’d do on this
boat, and I just thought, “I’m just going to
take him down to Chinatown and take him
at his lowest because it’s going to tell us
everything about what he’s going through,
without dialogue.”
So, I went there, but a million other writers
would approach that material and would
never go there, but I would go there. That’s
what makes it my voice. That’s what makes
Story Magazine // Issue 002
it me.
Writers need to announce themselves,
and really good writers, they don’t sound
like anybody else, unless they’re writing for
NCIS Season 5, and that’s okay because
some writers need the money, and it’s a lot of
money. There’s a lot of money in those jobs,
I mean, it’s more money than I’ve made in a
year, what you’d make on NCIS and the re-
runs and the residuals and all that. I mean,
it’s fantastic money and there’s no shame
in that, but they’re not going to want voices
to sound that different.
[…]
Every time I don’t write enough in my voice
I get in trouble. They want the edge that I
offer. They want the sense of humor. They
want the darkness mixed with the light, and
that’s what I’m known for. They want sur-
prising ways that plot is uncovered.
Margaret Nagle shared much more
insight during our long conversation.
Visit StoryMagazine.media/blog for
additional insights from one of our
favorite writers.
NAGLE
Margaret Nagle started out acting in the hit TV series My
So-Called Life before becoming a screenwriter. Her first ef-
fort Warm Springs earned her a Writer’s Guild award for
Long Form Original Screenplay. Warm Springs also won an
Emmy Award for Best Television Movie.

Nagle has also won Writer’s Guild awards and been nomi-
nated for Emmy Awards for her work on Boardwalk Empire,
and her first feature film The Good Lie, starring Reese With-
erspoon, was screened in September at the Toronto Inter-
national Film Festival and will be released this month.

Watch trailer here.

Currently Nagle is developing a pilot she will exec produce

for Viola Davis at HBO with Dee Rees to write and direct.
She is also developing and will executive produce The Red
Band Society for Fox.

Story Magazine // Issue 002

STORY ARTS + YOU = HELPING REFUGEES

A good story alone makes the world a better place, but it’s rare that a good story
can also make a direct impact on improving the world.

We’ve spent 11 years getting the film The Good Lie made because we believed this story
needed to be told. The cast and I have just spent the summer touring with the film and have
been overwhelmed by the support it’s getting — the film had a 10 minute standing ovation
at the Toronto Film Festival and more standing ovations all across North America.

But that’s just the beginning of the good news because we’ve also managed to raise
$500,000 for the refugees of South Sudan before the film was even released nationwide. It’s
encouraging, but millions of people are still suffering.

The people of South Sudan still need help.

Please watch the film, which is currently playing nationwide, to show your support the good
people of South Sudan and donate what you can by clicking the button below.

Many Thanks,
Margaret Nagle

Your donations will support the work of organizations such as:

 FILM REVIEW:

THE
IMITATION
GAME
Robert McKee gives his take on Graham Moore’s extraordinary adaptation.

Two brilliant achievements elevate the sto-
rytelling in The Imitation Game (book by An-
drew Hodges and screenplay by Graham
Moore).
First: A wholly unforeseen turning point
within the climax sends the audience into a
massive, breathtaking reconfiguration of the
film’s central plot and the history of World
War II itself.
Second: The historical drama, on its own,
would have been suspenseful and engag-
ing but conventional. What makes this film
extraordinary is its subplot. The protago-
nist, portrayed with consummate skill and
sensitivity by Benedict Cumberbatch, un-
dergoes the most moving disillusionment
arc I’ve experienced since Phillip Seymore
Kaufman gave us Truman Capote.
I highly recommend seeing this film more
than once to study screenwriting at its finest.

Story Magazine // Issue 002

ED SAXON

HOW
HOLLYWOOD
REALLY WORKS PART 2
Ed Saxon produced Academy Award winning Philadelphia and Silence
of the Lambs along with 21 other films. In his ongoing series on the inner
workings of Hollywood, Ed discusses when a script should move from the
writer’s personal folder to producers’ inboxes.

Story Magazine // Issue 002

HOW
HOLLYWOOD
REALLY WORKS
HOLLYWOOD IS COMPETITIVE
A common question that I get asked by
writers is, “When should I take my script
into the world?” It’s great to write and write
but eventually you have to cast your line in
the water and see if you can get any bites.
So, when should you take your script out
into the world?
It’s a tough question.
On the one hand you’re writing things so
you can get them made and get paid, but
on the other hand it is a hyper-competitive
marketplace out there. Professionals don’t
put shoddy work into anyone’s hand, and
neither should you.
Just as you don’t send your baby out into
the world until he’s had his breakfast and
snowsuit on, you want to make sure that
when you send your script out it’s ready to
go. Once it’s ready will it have a chance to
survive the harsh elements out there?
So, ask yourself the question, “Can I make
the script better?”
The rule of thumb is, if you haven’t done
the draft where you thought the script got
worse, then keep writing. Keep making it
better. If you want to have some idea of how
hard it is to make a good movie, just look at
the pictures Hollywood releases.
Story Magazine // Issue 002
Hollywood spends tens of millions of dollars
developing the scripts each year, and when
we go to the movie theaters we see the best
script they have within each genre. No stu-
dio head goes into their stack when mak-
ing a comedy and says, “You know what,
we got these three great comedies why not
make the fourth best one. We’ll save the
other three for later.”
That’s not how it works. They only make the
best ones they have. We go to the movies
and say, “That wasn’t very good.” That’s
because it’s incredibly hard to write a good
script and it’s even harder to make a great
movie.
So, if you’re going to compete with the
thousands of other screenplays, you have
to rewrite and make it and make your script
the best you can.
Use readers if you have them. Readers help
make writers better. You’d be crazy not to
take good advice that would improve your
script if you can, but only get one reader
per draft. As I mentioned last month, you
want to save a fresh reader for each draft if
possible.
Make sure it’s your best work because bad
material tends to follow you. You only get
a certain number of chances to have your
script read, so don’t send out anything but
your best work.
HOW
HOLLYWOOD
REALLY WORKS
As a producer, if I read a script and the first
fifteen pages are horrible I’m not going to
pick it up again. I just assume it’s not get-
ting any better. So, concentrate on your first
fifteen pages to get producers to read the
whole thing.
SCRAPPING IT AND STARTING
FRESH
But, what if you’ve done your absolute best
only to realize finally that the script isn’t sal-
vageable? What if you can’t correct it?
Put it in the wastebasket and start working
on the next thing. Keep in mind that even
successful screenwriters will have to write
at least ten full scripts before they ever pro-
duce something worthy of production.
Think of the wasted script as a contribution
to your education. You don’t expect your
high school (or even college) essays to get
published, right? So why should the scripts
you write during your education get made?
A script won’t get made unless it’s undeni-
able. There are only a certain number of un-
deniable scripts out there, and even many of
the undeniable ones don’t end up as good
films.
DO A READING
The last thing you can do to make sure your
script is as good as possible before you
Story Magazine // Issue 002
send it out in the world is to have a reading.
Do this after you know it’s undeniable, af-
ter you’ve had readers give good advice for
each draft, and after you’ve written a draft
where the script didn’t get any better.
I always encourage people to have a read-
ing, in part because it’s a lot of fun for writers
to see and hear their script played out loud.
There are community theaters and groups
of beginning actors that are often happy to
do this for practice.
Seeing your script read aloud will teach you
a good deal. Then you can make your fi-
nal changes before sending it out into the
world.
SENDING IT OUT
The principle is to wait long enough so that
the script can’t get any better, but don’t wait
a moment too long. Don’t sit on it thinking
inspiration will come and you’ll make it a
bunch better. Send it into the world once
it’s ready, not a moment before or after.
SAXON
Edward Saxon, an Oscar winner, is a graduate of the USC Peter Stark
Producing Program. He received his undergraduate degree at Mc-
Gill University. He produced the film The Silence of the Lambs, which
swept Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Direc-
tor, and Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

Mr. Saxon also produced Philadelphia (which won two Academy

Awards, including Best Actor (Tom Hanks). He produced Adaptation,
nominated for 4 Academy Awards including Best Supporting Actor
winner Chris Cooper, and the Academy Award nominated documen-
tary Mandela: Son of Africa, Father of a Nation.

Past credits also include: Tom Hanks’ directorial debut That Thing You
Do, Ulee’s Gold, Devil in a Blue Dress, Beloved, Something Wild, and
Miami Blues.

Saxon is married to the artist, Kirsten Coyne. They have two daughters
and live in Los Angeles.

Story Magazine // Issue 002

For more Hollywood insider tips, make sure you catch the
third installment of this multi-part series from Ed Saxon in
the next issue of Story Magazine.

Story Magazine // Issue 002

Story Magazine // Issue 002
ROBERT MCKEE

10 TRAITS
OF FAULTY
DIALOGUE PART 2

In Part Two of this multi-part series on faulty dialogue, Robert McKee

goes into more detail about Character Neutral Language, Ostentation,
Arid Speech, and Overstatement.

CHARACTER NEUTRAL LANGUAGE People tend to use clichés as shorthand for

The third trait of faulty dialogue is character
neutral language, which means all-purpose
lines that anyone might say in the same sit-
uation. Now, if you’re paying attention in life,
you’ll realize that people speak in clichés.
meaning. When something shocks a per-
son, they will often call upon the deity say-
ing, “Oh my god!” It’s a spontaneous ex-
pression, which is as common as dirt.“Oh
my god!” is so common that it becomes
character neutral. When used in dialogue
it’s a non-line.

Story Magazine // Issue 002

10 TRAITS
OF FAULTY
DIALOGUE
So, what do you do to change this?
Ask yourself this question: If my character
were to call upon the deity at this moment,
how would she or he do it in a way that is
unique and true to his or her character?
Perhaps your character might say, “Sweet
Bleeding Jesus!” Or, another character
might look up to the sky and say, “Oh,
Lord in heaven above!” Or, another charac-
ter might call upon the devil — rather than
the deity — and say something like, “I’ll be
damned to hell!”
Whatever choice your specific character
makes is still calling upon the deity but in
the character’s own way. Whichever way the
character says it, just make sure it’s specif-
ic to that character. In doing so, you will be
avoiding character neutral language – the
third trait of faulty dialogue.
Ostentation
The fourth trait of faulty dialogue is osten-
tation. This is when writers use flowery lan-
guage, often with very artistic pretensions.
In other words, the writer is trying to hard to
be an artist.
Here’s an example of ostentation in dialogue:
“I remember the Windjammer as she sailed
toward me, the setting sun ablaze astern,
out flung water at her feet, her shadow
flashed rope furled sails bulging sideways
like insolent cheeks of angels.”
Story Magazine // Issue 002
This was actually written by Rudyard Kipling
in not one of his finer moments.
Flowery language often happens in descrip-
tion because in writing description (espe-
cially the 3rd person description of a novel)
the writer wants intense language. Under
a certain control, writers writing description
will use metaphor, simile, synecdoche, me-
tonymy, alliteration, and vivid imagery.
However, that kind of language in dialogue
becomes ridiculous. If you absolutely feel it’s
appropriate your character speaks osten-
tatiously it had better be character specific.
Some pretentious fool in a farce situation
must speak it because language like that in
the mouths of most characters is ridiculous
and laughable.
ARID SPEECH
The fifth trait of flawed dialogue is the op-
posite of flowery language: arid speech. Di-
alogue that uses dry Latinate, polysyllabic,
unaffected language is arid speech. This
type of language is often used as a mask
for intellectual pretensions.
When writers wish to sound intelligent or
well educated they often add syllables to
words, words to sentences, sentences to
paragraphs, and paragraphs to chapters.
It’s the substitution of quantity for quality.
There are five useful tips about language
usage to make your dialogue sound as nat-
ural and unaffected as it can be:
10 TRAITS
OF FAULTY
DIALOGUE
1. Always prefer the familiar to the exotic.
For example, a character referring to his
home as his heart is affected, not unnatural
sounding language.
2. Prefer the concrete to the abstract. For
example, a character referring to her 3-bed-
room ranch as her ‘domicile’ or as her ‘habi-
tation’ is the kind of language no one would
use in life unless they’re really pretentious.
3. Always prefer direct phrases to circum-
locutions. For example, you wouldn’t write
something like this, “I took my hand out of
my pocket, closed it as tight as I could, mak-
ing sure that my thumb was on the outside
and not the inside of my fingers and then
I hammered on his face just as hard as I
could until suddenly it hurt me more than it
hurt him and I couldn’t close my hand.” In-
stead, the character could say, “I broke my
first on his jaw. Hurt like hell.”
Use the direct phrase unless there’s a char-
acter specific reason why your character
wanders around in his language.
4. Always prefer short words to long words.
For example, “Her fabrications are prolon-
gations of factuality,” is inferior to, “She
stretches the truth,” or even more simply
saying, “She fibs,” using the character spe-
cific language to say it.
5. Always prefers Saxon words to Lat-
in words. As writers, we know something
about the history of the English language.
We know it grew mostly out of two languag-
Story Magazine // Issue 002
es, Latin and German (Saxon), which were
merged over the centuries, and to which
words from French and other languages
were added throughout various conquests
and wars.
The result is a massive and complex lan-
guage with, in many cases, at least two
words for everything.
Whenever possible in writing dialogue, you
want to lean away from the Latin word in
favor of the Saxon word.
So again, using the same sentences we used
in the earlier example, “Her fabrications are
prolongations of factuality.” In this example
we see –tion and –ity endings. These are
Latin suffixes by the way of French. Unless
you have a good character specific reason
for using polysyllabic Latin language, always
try to say it the English way, which in this
example would be, “The bitch lies.” This is
punchy, strong Saxon dialogue rather than
long Latinate language.
Whatever your choices of vocabularies for
your characters, all dialogue must be char-
acter specific which means that the use
of words and phrases must be true to the
unique personality of that character. There-
fore, if your character is a scientist, a theo-
logian, a diplomat, a professor, or an in-
tellectual they may actually use Latinate,
polysyllabic, ostentatious and wordy dia-
logue.
In fact, if you were to take all of the exam-
10 TRAITS
OF FAULTY
DIALOGUE
ples of bad usage I’ve given and put them
in the mouth of a comic character with in-
tellectual pretensions they might become
character specific and hysterical.
AN ‘EAR FOR DIALOGUE’
I’m sure you’ve all heard the expression,
‘an ear for dialogue’. Reviewers have of-
ten complimented William Goldman, whom
many respect as the finest writer of dialogue
in movie history, in this way. But, when you
think of it, an, ‘ear for dialogue’ is a rather
odd phrase.
It almost suggests a writer with a reportorial
or stenographic gift for riding on buses and
listening to the people around them talking
and then writing down what they’re saying
quickly and accurately.
This is not the case.
If you eavesdropped for five minutes on fel-
low passengers’ conversations on a bus,
you’d realize that you would never put that
drivel on stage, page, or screen. Actual
conversational speech repeats itself like a
dribbling basketball.
Everyday talk in fact is flat, dull, and lacks im-
agery. It lacks vividness, figures of speech,
metaphors, simile, and trope. So, dialogue
must sound like talk. It must sound like ev-
eryday conversation, but it is a key element
in a work of art that we call a story. There-
fore, because this is art, not life, the content
and style of dialogue must be way above
Story Magazine // Issue 002
normal speech.
It all comes down to credibility. The audience
must believe that your characters naturally
talk the way you’ve made them talk. You
must heighten the content and expressivity
of your dialogue and yet never call attention
to talk as dialogue.
I’m sure that most of you, if indeed you ride
the bus at all, spend your time reading or
looking out the window daydreaming. You
do not listen in on passengers around you
and take notes. What you do is read other
people’s dialogue. We read novels, plays,
screenplays, and teleplays. We watch and
listen to dialogue performed on stage and
on screen.
So, your ‘ear for dialogue’ is the by-prod-
uct of every story you’ve ever seen or read.
Therefore, writers need to develop a finely
tuned sense for the rhythms and textures
of talk, plus an imagination to create quality
talk above the everyday.
Quentin Tarantino strikes a brilliant balance
between a natural sounding dialogue and a
highly expressive dialogue. No one in real life
talks the way Tarantino’s characters talk on
screen, but audiences believe their chatter
as if they were recorded right off the street
that day.
Tennessee Williams had a superb gift for
poetic dialogue on stage that flowed out of
his characters like wine from a decanter on
every page. The novelist Elmore Leonard is
10 TRAITS
OF FAULTY
DIALOGUE
unmatched for creating highly styled dia-
logue between lowlife characters.
All of these great writers create dialogue that
is credible, sounds like conversation yet is
beautifully expressive for their characters
and no other characters.
OVERSTATEMENT
The sixth problematic trait of a bad dialogue
is overstatement. Brawny words. Puny mo-
tivations. Puny conflicts. Profanity is often
used or misused in this way as a mask for
weak motivation. The writer of weak materi-
al thinks that by putting the F-word or even
C-word in the scenes that that language will
somehow raise the dramatic temperature.
On the other hand in wonderful television
series like Deadwood, The Wire, and The
Sopranos, profanity fits those characters
like a silk suit. In fact, you knew that the
characters really meant business when they
stop swearing.
For them, silence was very serious. So, if
you can imagine your characters talking in
harsh, aggressive, excited, emotional ways
then write it, but not until you have lifted
their desires, motivations, and their con-
flicts in stories and scenes to match their
expression.
As a general principle, once you have raised
Story Magazine // Issue 002
the characters’ motivation to match their
actions, then understate the dialogue rath-
er than overstate.
Let’s compare two, ‘cut off his head’ scenes.
Suppose we have a king who has fought a
war against a dread enemy. He’s won the
war. They bring the defeated enemy into the
king’s throne room. The king’s courtier says
to the king, “What should we do with the
prisoner, sire?”
The king says, “I want you to smash every
bone in his body. I want you to burn his skin
black then peel it off and feed it to him. I
want you to rip his eyes from his head and
his head from his neck.”
Now imagine a different writing where the
courtier says the same thing to the king who
simply responds, “Punish him.”
Which is more powerful? The overstated
harsh and violent dialogue or the simple
understated, “Punish him.” Implied in the
phrase is all the violence that he did not say.
Consequently, between the two characters,
who’s the most powerful? The one who
simply understates it and says only, “Punish
him,” is certainly the greater, more powerful
king than the one who loses his cool.
Stay tuned to the next issue of Story Magazine, where Robert
McKee will discuss traits seven through ten of faulty dialogue:
Talking Wallpaper, Forced Exposition, Malformation, and On
the Nose dialogue.

Story Magazine // Issue 002

Story Magazine // Issue 002
Story Magazine // Issue 002
ROBERT MCKEE

CHARACTER
CREATION:
INTRODUCTION
In the first part of an ongoing series, Robert McKee introduces us to
the study and craft of character creation paying particular attention
to writing characters from the inside.

Story Magazine // Issue 002

CHARACTER
CREATION:
INTRODUCTION
THE CRAFT OF CHARACTER
WRITING
With this new series of articles, we begin
an exploration of the principles and tech-
niques that guide the creation and design
of characters starting with the protagonist,
of course, then moving outward to the sup-
porting roles, and finally to the arrangement
of these characters into a cast.
The examples I will cite are, for the most
part, from fictional characters found in nov-
els, short stories, plays and musicals, televi-
sion, and film. However, these studies apply
equally to creative non-fiction, documentary,
investigative journalism, news coverage of
all kinds, advertising and business scenar-
ios, and certainly video games – any telling
in which characters, human or non-human,
pursue their desires.
Because all stories in all media begin and
end with characters acting and reacting
to the demands from their inner and outer
worlds.
We’ll start with the methods that sculpt the
protagonist, the central character who is
the empathetic heart of your story. The pro-
tagonist is simply a character or rather role,
Story Magazine // Issue 002
but as the central character, the protagonist
is the most complex and complete role that
you create for your story. Therefore, anything
we can say about the protagonist’s nature,
we can say to one degree or another about
all the other characters. However, when we
work with the qualities and dimensions of
a protagonist, we are building and shaping
character in absolute terms.
After the protagonist, we’ll look to the cre-
ation of secondary roles from supporting
characters that surround the central char-
acter, to the one-scene only bit parts, and
right down to the extras walking in the back-
ground.
What’s the best first step in creating a com-
pelling protagonist? Or, for that matter, what
is the best inspiration for any fresh, original
player in your cast? There are several pop-
ular approaches.
THE ‘POP-IN’ METHOD
Some writers about writing suggest you
should start with the first idea that pops off
at the top of your head and build out from
that, ultimately creating a character.
For example, you might spot a strange be-
CHARACTER
CREATION:
INTRODUCTION
havior in someone while shopping for sweat
socks in Walmart and you let that become
your inspiration for a character. You might
dream up a tell tale gesture or verbal tic,
practice it yourself, and from there create a
character. Or, maybe words open up your
creativity and you’re the kind of writer that
wonders about the different kinds of vocab-
ulary people have.
For example, you might wonder about the
speech of those that have never finished
high school versus the kind of people that
never get out of grad-school. You might
ask yourself: what kind of profanity do hip
teenagers use versus retirees in old folks
homes.
Or, maybe you pick a fashion style and build
a character. Or, perhaps you might dream
up an off-the-wall profession for your char-
acter. Maybe you would use a name as your
entry point into a character. Names can be
very provocative.
So, you take the first traits that pop into
your mind, focus on these, and fill the char-
acter out with trait upon trait. It’s kind of like
dressing up a mannequin in the department
store window.
Story Magazine // Issue 002
That’s one theory.
CATALOG CHARACTER SELECTION
Other writers about writing say you should
go into the store and buy yourself a charac-
ter, so to speak. These are people who list
characters by type. To give their systems
historical and psychological weight, these
writers prefer to call these characters ar-
chetypes. Judith Searle’s enneagram sys-
tem, for example, sketches out nine types
based on temperaments, the critic, the aes-
thete, the connector, et cetera.
Victoria Lynn Schmidt based her 45 types
of characters on the gods and goddesses
of Greek mythology. In a book entitled He-
roes in Heroines, the three co-authors out-
line sixteen positive personality types. While
in another wonderful book entitled Bullies,
Bastards and Bitches, Jessica Morrell lists
a similar number of negative types.
All these books are thought provoking in
different degrees. There’s no reason why
you shouldn’t read catalog type books like
these. I say read everything. Study the craft
from all angles because you never know
what idea might kick start your talent.
CHARACTER
CREATION:
INTRODUCTION
There is no question that types or traits can
be useful at times. Thinking in traits or types
– these outside-in systems can certainly
give you a useable character, maybe even
a good character, a good walk on, a good
bit part, or a good supporting role perhaps.
So, I’m not suggesting you should ignore
your first impressions or ignore character
catalogs. Rather, I believe you should col-
lect these into a file for future use to round
out the surface of the characterization.
However, as soon as possible, you must
find your way to the characters inner self
and imagine his/her life from the inside out.
Working the character from the outside-in
only, making lists of character traits or call-
ing upon stereotypes – no matter how valu-
able they may be – is the least creative way
to work. More often than not, these meth-
ods dead-end in worn out interchangeable
clichés we’ve see a thousand times before.
Outer traits of dress style or verbal style are
refinements, or telling details, best added
as the last polishing step of characteriza-
tion.
The surprising discovery that your char-
acter plays like a certain classical arche-
type is great, as long as it’s the end result
of your creativity not the beginning of paint
Story Magazine // Issue 002
by numbers portrait. For example, it can be
enlightening to be looking at your protago-
nist’s best friend in the final draft and think,
“Damn, Tommy is just like a court gesture.”
CREATING CHARACTERS FROM
OUR INNER SELF
Artists create. Hacks copy.
I advocate creating characters from the in-
side out because I want the writer to start
at the very core of a character, the self, that
one of a kind consciousness who lies at the
irreducible crux of each character.
With a firm sense of that unique self and
how that self sees itself in the world, you
begin to layer the deep psychology of the
character, and then the traits of personali-
ty and social characterization outward from
that center
Now, we all know that creativity doesn’t al-
ways run in a straight line. The strata of char-
acterization may or may not pour smooth-
ly out of your writer’s knowledge in perfect
order, layer by layer inside to outside. While
creating a character, your ideas might zigzag
in one direction then another, or jump from
one level to another. That’s natural. Nev-
CHARACTER
CREATION:
INTRODUCTION
ertheless, the deep source of an author’s
inspiration for his characters flow from the
heart of the characters being – the self.
Nothing in nature, not forest, not ocean, not
star, can rival the multi-tiered dimensionality
of the human self. A galaxy, despite its bil-
lions of immense blazing quantities, is just a
whole lot of simplistic mindless matter. As-
tronomically vast black holes and superno-
vas are just nature’s version of Hollywood’s
CGI. But, the human self, with all its intense
convoluted qualities is a sentient complex,
conscious being.
Indeed the essence of human-ness is aware-
ness. Evolution built a dimension into hu-
man nature that it denied all other biological
creatures, self-consciousness. The being at
the core of the human being is a self-con-
scious self. Think about the very act of in-
trospection, when you look within yourself,
who’s doing the looking? When you think
about yourself, who’s doing the thinking.
The self becomes an object for itself.
As the word introspection implies, the self,
inspects itself. You try, right now. Breathe,
relax, and aim your thoughts inward. Take a
gaze at yourself, at who you are and what
you are with no actualizations, and no de-
Story Magazine // Issue 002
nials. Take a clear look at yourself in truth.
Fine.
You have just done what only a human be-
ing can do and therefore only a character
can do. What you’ve faced within yourself,
the self, is the starting point of the creation
of any complex character.
Now, all living things, even plants are to
some degree, conscious, as they survey
their surroundings or react to stimulus. But,
only the human mind can detach itself from
the flux of existence and withdraw in order to
study its own identity, to trace the flow of its
thoughts. Only human consciousness can
coolly sit back and observe the relentless
passage of time etched in the ever-chang-
ing world around it, while simultaneously
time drags that consciousness down an ev-
er-crumbling tunnel of life to nothingness.
Only the self floats outside of time while it
measures its dreaded drift for the end of
time. I’m sure that like me, you’re well aware
of the fear and pain that the terrible con-
sciousness-of-the-self-in-time inflicts on us
poor human beings. The self, even in the
simplest of characters, is to say the least,
complicated. But, in the most fascinating
characters, simple complications become
CHARACTER
CREATION:
INTRODUCTION
amazingly complex.
The self is a web work of multi-dimension-
al layers of consciousness that float over a
cloud of unconsciousness. Our physicality,
the flesh and bone animal that houses the
self is a primitive beast whose genetic roots
trails back in time of billions of years.
On the other hand, our mentality, the self-
aware mind that lives inside the beast, has
virtually divine creative power, but it’s also
riddled with dynamic contradictions. For ex-
ample, the mind fills itself with vast knowl-
edge only to look out at an unknowable
future. For, no matter how much a charac-
ter learns or knows, she can never know
what’s going to happen in the next minute,
the next week, or the next year.
Human beings first use their godlike imag-
inations to create then their raging brutality
to destroy whatever they create. The hu-
man self may be as manifold as Hamlet or
as minimal as Bambi. This ineffable self lives
off the blood and brain of a corporal body
and yet soars above it.
As John Paul Sartre observed, “I am as in-
separable from the world as light, yet as ex-
iled from the world as light. Like light, I glide
Story Magazine // Issue 002
over the surface of stones and water, never
gripped, never held, always alone.”
One of the sad truths of life is that no matter
how long you live, no matter how many peo-
ple you keep close to you, there’s only one
person you’ll ever know, and that is your-
self. No matter how long or how intimately
you live with another person. No matter how
much you love your beloved, you’ll never
know your lover in anything like the depth
and insight that you have into yourself.
The only consciousness you’ll ever know is
your own, your inner self. But the irony of
our essentially solitary lives, is that despite
the differences between human beings, dif-
ferences of age, gender, education, accul-
turation, we are all far more alike than we are
different. We are all human beings, sharing
the same fundamental human experiences.
So, you can be sure that if you are think-
ing it and feeling it inside of yourself, so is
everyone walking down the street of your
days toward you, all having the same core
of human experience.
And that is why when the writer asks the fun-
damental questions of character creation, “If
I were this character in this situation, what
would I do?” The honest answer is always
CHARACTER
CREATION:
INTRODUCTION
correct. You would do the human thing, and
so the more you penetrate the mysteries of
your own humanity, the more you’re able to
understand the humanity of others. There-
fore, the source of all great character writing
is self-knowledge. To quote the great writ-
er Anton Chekov, “Everything I know about
human nature, I learned from me.”
Now, I cannot coach any writer on how to
look inside and search for the humanity she
hopes to find. I don’t know how a person
teaches herself about herself. All I know is
that self-knowledge is the root source of
the writers’ power to create characters and
conversely, ignorance of your inner nature
is certain to produce weak writing.
If you can’t draw upon the truth within your-
self, then you must steal ideas from other
writers and recycle their clichés. So, the pro-
cess of character creation begins as you slip
into a nameless self, floating somewhere in
your imagination, somewhere in the world,
somewhere in time. You enter into that con-
sciousness as if it were your own, so you
can see and express life from this particular
human being’s point of view.
You are the character’s first actor and you
must improvise and act out the role to dis-
Story Magazine // Issue 002
cover and build a complex identity outward
from a core of pure consciousness. As I
mentioned above, this inside-out method
is by far the most creative way to work, but
it’s also the most difficult method of char-
acter writing.
The easy way to work is to start with a type
– hero, heroine, villain, femme-fatale, side-
kick, girlfriend, whatever. All purpose roles
like that come dressed in ready-made sto-
rylines, but I warn you, if the first stitch you
net in your story is a cliché, don’t be sur-
prised when your story unravels faster than
grandma’s Christmas sweater.
In this series on character, I will argue that
the inner self supported by the writers’ trea-
sury of self-knowledge is the stuff and sub-
stance from which we build original, brilliant
characters. And a brilliant character strug-
gling against the world to reach her desires
is the stuff of substance for a great story.
So in this series, I will make the inner/pri-
vate self the center of a very effective, very
practical method of character creation. This
method is by no means new. Like Chekov
and Sartre, I believe it is the ages old method
that the greatest writers have always used.
In issue 3 of Story Magazine, Robert McKee will discuss
writing in character as he continues his series on the
Creation of Characters.

Story Magazine // Issue 002

Story Magazine // Issue 002
 BASSIM EL WAKIL

AN INTRO TO
GENRE THEORY
PART 2

In Part 2 of his series on genre, Bassim El Wakil explores core events in

more depth before discussing the importance of understanding teleology.

Story Magazine // Issue 002

AN INTRO
TO GENRE
THEORY
DELVING DEEPER INTO THE CORE
EVENT
So, let’s define the core event a bit more
because it’s very important. If you under-
stand core value, core emotions, and the
core event of the principle genre the rest
of the conventions follow much easier. Un-
derstanding these gets you to the heart of
what the genre is about. Sadly, it’s often dif-
ficult to tell the difference between conven-
tion and cliché.
Convention is something that you need to
do in order for the story to create the effect
you want it to, but a cliché is how you ex-
ecute the convention. Sometimes, clichés
seems to be conventions, but they’re not.
They’re cliché and you don’t need them.
On the other hand, the core event is import-
ant. It’s a turning point. It’s a story event – a
meaningful change through conflict. Now,
if you don’t have a core event or if you ex-
ecuted the core event badly, then the work
is half as good because everything is built
around the core event. It’s not the same
as climax. Climax is a specific thing to do
with structure in story. It’s not to do with the
genre.
Story Magazine // Issue 002
If you have a bad core event or if you leave
it out completely the story will be unsatis-
fying. An example that illustrates this from
recent memory is what happened with tele-
vision between Breaking Bad and Dexter.
Both are crime stories, so the core event
for both is the exposure of the criminal. In
Breaking Bad, for five excellent years, we
watched the world of Walter White opening
up in front of your eyes. The whole time we
were all waiting and wondering what was
going to happen when the world found out
that Walt was Heisenberg.
Piece by piece different characters found
out. Not everyone did, and some charac-
ters react differently, but finally in a cliffhang-
er that should have been illegal, Hank dis-
covers that Walter is Heisenberg. We had a
very long year’s wait after Hank’s revelation
before they start paying it off.
From then on we start seeing how Walter is
exposed, but he gets away with it. He loses
his family, but he gets away with it because
he ends up being Heisenberg, which was
what he wanted all along. His criminal em-
pire is intact. There will never be any more
baby blue. It’s all done. He won. He never
AN INTRO
TO GENRE
THEORY
got caught. He never got arrested. He never
got put on trial. He never got put in prison.
On the other hand, there is Dexter. For eight
years we waited, wondering if Dexter would
get exposed as the Bay Harbor Butcher,
and they teased it wonderfully for at least
four of those years.
Debra finally found out. We were so excit-
ed, but in the end Miami Metro never found
out, Masuka never found out, Batista never
found out. LaGuerta found out, but no one
else did. So, Dexter’s world is never really
exposed. Rita died before she could find
out. Cody and Astor left. We were waiting
for him to be exposed as, Dexter, the serial
killer. He never does and he ends up being
a lumberjack, and people were so disap-
pointed because what was the point to this
story? There was no point in any of it.
Damages made the same mistake. Dam-
ages was wonderful, but for that final sea-
son why was Patty never exposed? She
wasn’t exposed, so the fifth season felt flat
because we didn’t see the core thing they
promised. We want to see justice/injustice
and that intrigue at the highest level, which
would come during the exposure because
Story Magazine // Issue 002
we’d think, “How are they going to catch
him or how will they get away with it?”
Intrigue is maximized by the core event and
we want to see that.
The core event can go anywhere and it can
be done in any fashion. Fracture opens with
the core event of exposure of the criminal.
The very first scene of Fracture is Anthony
Hopkins being exposed as a criminal and
the whole film plays that out. At the other
end of the spectrum is a show like Colom-
bo, where the credits roll as soon as he ex-
poses the criminal.
You can also see the difference (as I men-
tioned in the first part of this series) be-
tween crime and political drama. If you look
at a crime story like The Sopranos it’s not
about the criminal being exposed. Every-
one knows Tony is the criminal. He’s not
hiding it from anyone. What we’re waiting
to see is when these other guys will go up
against Tony, and Tony even has dreams of
rebellion in the fifth season.
Sometimes, though, the core event does
not necessitate a certain outcome. For ex-
ample, in two wonderful films In the Valley
AN INTRO
TO GENRE
THEORY

of Elah and Seven, the criminal is caught ology is key.

and punished, but it’s still doesn’t feel like
justice. So, there is a huge variety and pos-
sibility in the core event, but it needs to be
there in some satisfying form.
PRINCIPLE GENRE AND TELEOLOGY
In the next article in this series, we’re going
to move onto presentational genres, but
I’d like to leave you with a final word about
principle genres and teleology.
You don’t do things by accident.
These things are not just accidental con-
structions or mishaps. You’re doing things
with specific desire. You’re making choic-
es. It’s the product of design. These prin-
ciple genre conventions are there because
they’re purpose driven. They fulfill functions.
They are not just there because of tradition.

Teleology is a long and a somewhat philo-

sophical word, but what it basically means
is the study of design, final purpose, and
ends. Is it reasonable to conclude that any
aspect of the story is done by design or
not?
This happens in every aspect of life. Archeol-
Bassim El Wakil is an action genre scholar and co-
ogists need to know the difference between
author with Robert McKee of the upcoming book:
rocks that are put there by accident and Action: The Art of Excitement.
rocks that are put there by minds. Knowing
the difference is crucial to an archeologist’s
findings.

The same can be said for story design. Te-

leology means understanding what is done
by design. It’s something that is kind of
looked down upon recently, but in art tele-

Story Magazine // Issue 002

Stay tuned to Issue 3 of Story Magazine, where Bassim El
Wakil will discuss presentational genres.

Story Magazine // Issue 002

Story Magazine // Issue 002
 7 QUESTIONS WITH

ROBERT MCKEE
In November 2014 Robert McKee sat down with the London Screenwriter’s Festival
to discuss the future of screenwriting, television, and story.

Story Magazine // Issue 002

SEVEN
QUESTIONS
WITH MCKEE
LSF: Is TV the new feature film for-
mat?
RM: Story told on the big screen is inside
of 3 hours, and story told on the television
screen is up to 100 hours, so the two are
entirely different mediums. TV is almost as
different from film as the theater is from film
or the novel is from film.
The most critical difference in these different
genres is the difference between live and re-
corded – theater, television, film, and prose
– and length. Of all four media, television is
by far the longest. A TV series like Breaking
Bad was almost 100 hours. In terms of the
volume, Breaking Bad would equal almost
the entire works of Charles Dickens.
It’s not a different format, it’s a different me-
dium.
LSF: What can television offer screen-
writers that feature films cannot?
In USA, talking from an American prospec-
tive, the finest writers for the film have been
migrating into television because of what
television can offer them that film does not.
First of all, film has become an incredibly
conservative medium. This is as true in Eu-
Story Magazine // Issue 002
rope as it is in Hollywood. It is very con-
servative in terms of politics - if you want a
film that says anything serious about poli-
tics you have to watch a documentary. The
political correctness of the world has been
limiting film over and over again into smaller
and smaller circles of what is proper sub-
ject matter for a film.
Generalizing, films are either becoming
more fantasy and special effects-driven (in
the United States) or more minimalist and
decorative photography driven (in Europe)
and the subject matters are highly politically
correct.
For example, when film looks at poverty,
what you get is the, “picturesque poor.” If
cinema really looked at poor people the way
it did in Slumdog Millionaire, that would be
really absurd. However, if you go over to
television, that is where you get some bite.
This is where politics are looked at with
sharp teeth. This is where the poor are not
picturesque. Just go watch any episode of
Justified and ask, “Is this a picturesque view
of the poor?”
It is not.
What you get in television is immense free-
SEVEN
QUESTIONS
WITH MCKEE
dom. In television, they really don’t care
whose toes you step on. In fact, they kind of
want you to step on toes because it causes
a lot of controversy whereas in film they go
out of their way to avoid that controversy.
In TV, you not only get freedom of subject
matter – and it can be very dark, very vio-
lent, and very sexual or whatever – you also
get freedom of expression.
In literature we have a principle called, “the
unreliable narrator.” When you turned to an
episode of The Sopranos, you couldn’t be
certain that what you were looking at was
real, was a dream, was a hallucination, or
was a flashback. If it were a flashback, you
couldn’t be certain that it was something
that actually happened. It could be a faux
flashback, the storytelling freedom that you
have in television far exceeds that what you
have in film. You have tremendous freedom
– freedom of subject matter and freedom
of expression in television because the net-
works only care about ratings.
As long as you can draw an audience, no
matter what techniques of expression or
subject matter, it seems to be irrelevant. In
fact, I have a friend who writes for HBO and
he tells me that when he goes in there and
pitches to HBO, the first note that he gets
Story Magazine // Issue 002
more often than not is, “Not dark enough.”
Now, imagine Fox, Sony, or any Hollywood
studio turning to a screenwriter and say-
ing, “Not dark enough.” That’s not going to
happen.
The second thing you get in television is
money. If you think that a million dollars for
a screenplay is a lot of money, you have no
idea what real money is. If you want to make
real money, and I am talking tens and hun-
dreds of millions of dollars, create a great
video game or television series. When Larry
David sold the Seinfeld sitcom into syndi-
cation, the team made $400 million dollars
each and that is not counting the money
made while the show was actually first time
showing. That is real money.
The third thing you get is power. In film, the
directors run the show. In television, and
again I am talking in the American system,
the writers run the show. If you are a hell of
a writer, if you are a Matthew Weiner, or a
Vince Gilligan, an Ann Biderman, a David
Chase, or a Terrence Winter (among many
more), and create a great series, you then
become a producer.
In Hollywood you call this a hyphenate – it is
somebody who is both – a writer/producer.
SEVEN
QUESTIONS
WITH MCKEE
When you are watching an American televi-
sion series and you see all of those opening
credits - Executive Producer, Co-Producer,
Associate Producer – they are all writers.
That is the writing staff - that is the writer’s
room. They are all called producers now
because they all own a piece of the show.
Why?
Because they have proven they can write
and their agents have negotiated them up
to the producers position in the series, and
now they are going to make real money.
They have power. They hire the directors
or they direct themselves. Everybody is re-
sponsible to the show runner, to the creator.
Why in the world would you write for the
movies?
If I were young, I wouldn’t put myself through
that. I would try to create a great television
series, become a show runner, author to
give myself creative freedom, power and
money, beyond anything that movies can
offer. As I have been saying for years in my
lecture, TV is the future and I think anybody
who is trying to make a living as a writer
today for the screen should seriously give
consideration to write for TV first.
What is the most compelling TV writing
Story Magazine // Issue 002
in recent years and why is it so com-
pelling to both the networks who op-
tioned it and the viewers who loved it?
That question answers itself.
Why any writing has an audience and a pro-
duction is because it is compelling. It is sim-
ply good writing - great characters, great
stories. Audiences and producers don’t sit
there parsing anything out except by what
they feel when they read it or when they
see it.
Does it hook their interest? Does it lock
them into empathy with these characters?
Does it move their emotions? Does it raise
their curiosity? Do they question how these
characters’ lives will turn out constantly in
their mind, episode-by-episode, scene-by-
scene, and overall in the whole series? There
is no magic formula. There is nothing one
can point to that says, “If you do this and if
you do that, then this is definitely going to
get you into production.” There is nothing
you can point to other than saying it has to
be great writing, wonderful characters, and
a beautifully told story.
When you look at those series that are suc-
cessful you see that is simply quality. Great
SEVEN
QUESTIONS
WITH MCKEE
examples are Downton Abbey, The Vikings,
Breaking Bad, Ray Donovan, Orange is
the New Black, In Treatment, The Sopra-
nos, Boardwalk Empire, The Good Wife,
Justified, Six Feet Under, Louie, Game of
Thrones, True Detective, House of Cards,
The Wire, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and on it
goes.
They are comedies and dramas, but in ev-
ery way the writing is superb. All I can say
is that you have to write really well.
In the UK we tend to write alone or in
partnership, whereas in the US writer’s
rooms are a commonplace. What are
the advantages and disadvantages of
writing in the UK solo or in a partner-
ship of two?
The advantages and disadvantages de-
pend on point of view. I can think of one
advantage on wanting to write a solo se-
ries. It is not impossible to be the only writ-
er. Michael Hirst, who is a wonderful writer,
is working himself to the bone writing The
Vikings on his own. The Vikings is brilliant,
really brilliant in every way – it is beautifully
directed, wonderfully acted, overall a great
production – it is a superb television series.
Story Magazine // Issue 002
But, poor Michael Hirst is, as far as I know,
the only writer for this series. Julian Fellow-
es was the creator and writer of Downton
Abbey and then Shelagh Stephenson and
Tina Pepler have stepped in and worked
with him too, but by and large it is Julian
Fellowes’ child. So what is the advantage
for those guys?
Gratification.
The advantage for the writer is that he is
very gratified, to be able to step back from
all of those hours, all of those episodes and
seasons and sit back and say, “I did that.” It
is a massive, cathedral-sized piece of work.
That is great achievement for that individual
writer.
On the other hand, when it is only one writer
or one pair of writers, no one or two people
are going to be able to keep a series go-
ing to the volume that the world would like
today. This is just a rule of thumb, but the
standard TV series in America now is the
100-hour series. 100 hours of quality writ-
ing is very likely to be beyond the scope of
one mind.
This is why in America we have writer’s
rooms. You have a lot of writers making con-
SEVEN
QUESTIONS
WITH MCKEE
tributions. The writer’s rooms are developed
in terms of certain writers specializing in one
character or another, or certain writers are
there only to write gag lines for example.
They divide the labor into whatever works.
One writer, the show runner, runs them all.
It is not as if it is chaos with 12 guys sitting
around arguing all the time. There is a lot of
arguing going on, but sooner or later every-
thing they have done has to go through the
show runner and the creator. That creator
is the quality control person to make cer-
tain that the series stays at the level they’ve
established.
From the audiences’ point of view, there are
no advantages but there are plenty of disad-
vantages. For example, I lament that there
are only two seasons of Fawlty Towers. I
own them and I have seen them again and
again. Basil Fawlty and the marvelous cast
could have been in a hundred episodes, of a
fountain of hilarity, but John Cleese insisted
on writing it on his own or with one partner,
and at the end of twelve episodes he was
either bored or ran out of ideas and quit.
Some really good comedy writers could
have taken those characters and creat-
ed one marvelous farce after another, that
would have certainly pleased me. It is a dis-
Story Magazine // Issue 002
advantage for the audience because one
writer insists on being an auteur, the series
is cut short as a result.
The audience does not care who wrote it.
All the audiences want is great characters
and great storytelling. I think this is true in
England, too, but in America the show is
the thing. What is important at the end of
the day is the quality of the work - the show.
I worked in theater for half my life and in
the theater the show is the thing. The same
thing should apply in film, not the ego of
the auteur director. What is important is the
work and the result.
How do you sustain fascination and en-
gagement with characters over many
seasons?
The key is great character. When I do my
Television Drama day, the great emphasis
is on complexity of character and complex-
ity of cast design. What keeps the audience
interested over season after season is on
character development, either revelation of
unseen dimensions and qualities within the
character or change – the character is ac-
tually growing somehow or devolving, but
changing.
SEVEN
QUESTIONS
WITH MCKEE

Change and revelation fascinate the audi-
ence. When the characters are exhausted,
and when there is no more change or reve-
lation, when it becomes repetitious, that is
when TV series die. For example Dexter –
Dexter was fascinating for several seasons
but then it ran out of development of char-
acters and it had nowhere else to go with
these characters so they began repeating
themselves. So again, the key is complexity
of character.
What mistakes do you see in shows
that last just one season?
ships – things you can parse out year after
year to keep the audience involved.
The problem in television is not the storytell-
ing first. The storytelling will grow out of the
nature of the characters and the complex-
ity of their relationships. So, the first thing
is to focus on cast design. By cast design,
I mean that the most complex characters
are at the center, and it radiates out to the
mid-players. Design a beautiful cast and
then figure out what could happen to these
people and begin to tell a story.

It is similar to: what is the key to great suc-

cess? Great writing. What is the key to an
unsuccessful series? Bad writing. What do
I see in these shows? They are badly writ-
ten. The dialogue is on the nose, there is
no subtext but full of clichés in plotting and
characters, a lot of heavy handed false mys-
tery, all of the devices of bad writing.

What advice do you offer a new writer

developing?

As I said before, the key is cast design, a

cast of characters in their setting, a great
network of contradiction and complexities,
complex characters, and complex relation-

Story Magazine // Issue 002

 YEAR-IN-REVIEW

ALUMNI
SUCCESS
STORIES
2014 has been another big year for Robert McKee’s alumni who
continue to make waves in the industry. Congratulations to these
28 talented filmmakers who honor Truth in Story:

THE SONG

Richard Ramsey
Director / Writer

“Robert, Your seminar and

book were a tremendous help
to me as I wrote and direct-
ed the film, and so I would like
to express my sincere and im-
mense gratitude. Thank you
very much for sharing your
principles and your passion.”

Story Magazine // Issue 002

ALUMNI
SUCCESS
STORIES

INTERSTELLAR
Nilo Otero
First Assistant Director

BIG HERO 6
Paul Briggs
Head of Story

Damon Wayans Jr.

“Jamie Chung” (voice)

Roy Conli
Producer

John Lasseter
Executive Producer

Kristina Reed
Co-Producer

Story Magazine // Issue 002

ALUMNI
SUCCESS
STORIES

THE THEORY
OF EVERYTHING

James Marsh
Director

Lisa Bruce
Producer

HORRIBLE BOSSES 2

Jonathan Goldstein
Story

Michael Markowitz
Characters

Chris Bender
Producer

John Cheng
Producer

Story Magazine // Issue 002

ALUMNI
SUCCESS
STORIES

THE IMITATION GAME

Ido Ostrowsky
Producer

BEFORE I DISAPPEAR

Richard Schiff
“Bruce”

Story Magazine // Issue 002

ALUMNI
SUCCESS
STORIES

FOXCATCHER

Tom Heller
Executive Producer

THE HUNGER GAMES:

MOCKINGJAY (PART 1)

Suzanne Collins
Executive Producer, Adaption
and Novel

Danny Strong
Screenplay

Jan Foster
Executive Producer,
Production Manager

Christopher Surgent
First Assistant Director

Story Magazine // Issue 002

ALUMNI
SUCCESS
STORIES

THE BETTER ANGELS

Brit Marling
“Nancy Lincoln”

PENGUINS OF MADAGASCAR

Eric Darnell
Director and Screenplay

Simon Smith
Director

John Aboud
Screenplay

Michael Coulton
Screenplay

Tom McGrath
Characters and voice of “Skipper”

Chris Miller
“Kowalski” (voice)

Camille Leganza
Production Supervisor

Story Magazine // Issue 002

ASK MCKEE
YOUR BURNING
QUESTIONS
Story Magazine // Issue 002
ASK
ROBERT
MCKEE
QUESTION:
In some movies there is a nested story, so the
plots are nested inside of each other. Even
in terms of dialogue. So, in something like
House, for example, they will have 3 plots
running. It will be one sentence on this plot,
one sentence on this plot, and one sentence
on this plot — back and forth. What’s the
purpose of that? Or, what does it allow?
ANSWER:
First of all, this allows pace. By having more
than one story going on you can cross cut.
An audience is so story literate, that if you
just show them the peaks of the mountain
they know the mountain that’s underneath
of it.
Going from story to story, cross cutting, and
you see this in A Fish Called Wanda, which
we study in the Story Seminar, allows you
to not have to go through all the stuff labo-
riously. If the audience sees an effect they
know the cause. If they see an effect, they
will apply the cause, if it’s been well set-up
Story Magazine // Issue 002
of course, otherwise they’re confused.
But, if it’s been well set up, often you can
go from effect to effect to effect. It becomes
retrospectively obvious to the audience.
They reconfigure reality from evidence on
the surface. Their mind knows, puts it all
together, and figures it out in a flash. So,
really good writing is not tedious. It doesn’t
explain everything.
If there’s any reason to suspect the audi-
ence won’t get it, then you put the cause in,
but multiple story lines gives you the possi-
bility to crosscut, so that you can eliminate
all the banality and all the triviality and as
a result the story has a narrative drive and
tremendous pace.
In each issue of Story Magazine, Robert
McKee will answer your burning ques-
tions.
So if you have a question about wirting
or storytelling, make sure you email us
for your chance to have it featured in
an upcoming issue.
Story Magazine // Issue 002
IN THE
NEXT ISSUE:
• Steven Pressfield on his art and craft in conversation with Robert McKee
• Mark Whitney on storytelling and live dramedy
• Superstar agent and editor Shawn Coyne on his editorial genesis
• Robert McKee continues his series on character creation
• 7 Questions with a new media storyteller
• More timeless story teaching from Hollywood’s master of the craft
• And much more

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