How To Design A Story
Summary of "Story" by Robert McKee
📚 There are tons of great books that will help you level-up your writing.
🕒 I’m saving you countless hours by summarizing a new one every single month.
✍️ Story by Robert McKee will teach you the eternal principles of crafting compelling narratives. It is one of the most valuable books I’ve ever read.
My summary is broken into four posts:
Part 1: The Decline Of Story
Part 2: The Elements Of Story
Part 3: A Guide To Creating Protagonists
Part 4: How To Design Your Story
Here is Part 4:
A story is a design in five parts:
Inciting Incident
Progressive Complications
Crisis
Climax
Resolution
1. Inciting Incident:
Inciting Incident - An event that throws the protagonist’s life out of balance, arousing a conscious desire for something he feels will set things right.
As a story begins, the protagonist’s life is more or less in balance.
He has successes and failures, ups and downs.
Who doesn’t?
But life is in relative control.
Then an event occurs that radically upsets its balance— something either really good or really bad happens.
🔍 Occasionally, an inciting incident needs two events: setup and payoff.
Like in JAWS:
Setup: A shark eats a swimmer and her body washes onto the beach.
Payoff: The sheriff discovers the corpse and decides to go after the shark.
If a setup is required, don’t delay the payoff.
An Inciting Incident happens in only one of two ways:
Randomly
By decision
The Inciting Incident must be shown, it can’t only be referred to (each subplot has its own Inciting Incident, which may or not be “onscreen”).
If an event radically upsets our sense of control, what would we want?
To restore balance.
Out of the need to restore the balance thrown off by the inciting incident, the protagonist conceives of an Object of Desire.
Object of Desire - Something physical or situational or attitudinal that the protagonists lacks or needs to restore balance in his life.
The Inciting Incident propels the protagonist into an active pursuit of this object or goal, shaping the other four parts of a story’s design (Progressive complications, Crisis, Climax, Resolution).
⏰ Bring in the Central Plot’s Inciting Incident as soon as possible.
The instant the audience has a sufficient understanding of character and world to react fully, execute your Inciting Incident.
If an Inciting Incident is archetypal in nature, it requires no setup and can occur immediately.
2. Progressive Complications:
To complicate means to make life difficult for characters.
To complicate progressively means to generate more and more conflict as they face greater and greater forces of antagonism, creating a succession of events that passes points of no return.
The Law Of Conflict - Nothing moves forward in a story except through conflict.
A story must not retreat to actions of less quality or magnitude, but move progressively forward to a final action beyond which the audience cannot imagine another.
Three levels of conflict:
Inner Conflict
Personal Conflict
Extra-Personal Conflict
3. Crisis:
The protagonist’s quest has carried him through the Progressive Complications until he’s exhausted all actions to achieve his desire, except one.
This is the “dragon” that guards the Object of Desire.
The protagonist must make a decision to take one action or another in a last effort to achieve his Object of Desire.
It must be a dilemma.
The choice between good and evil (or between right and wrong) is no choice at all.
A compelling character’s actions are always for the “good” as he’s come to believe it or rationalize it.
True choice is dilemma.
It occurs in two situations:
A choice between irreconcilable goods
From the character’s view two things are desirable, he wants both, but circumstances are forcing him to choose only one.
A choice between the lesser of two evils
From the character’s view two things are undesirable, he wants neither, but circumstances are forcing him to choose one.
How a character chooses in a true dilemma is a powerful expression of his humanity.
4. Climax:
The action the protagonist chooses to take during the Crisis becomes the story’s ultimate event, causing a positive, negative, or ironic (positive & negative) Climax.
It’s the turning point of your story where we see whether they obtain their Object of Desire.
Generally, Crisis and Climax happen in the final minutes of a story and in the same scene.
The Climax must be full of meaning— a value swing at maximum charge that’s absolute and irreversible.
William Goldman argues that the key to all story endings is to give the audience what it wants, but not the way it expects.
In Aristotle’s words, an ending must be both “inevitable and unexpected.”
5. Resolution:
This is any material left after the Climax, and had three possible uses:
To wrap up any subplots
To show how the events of the Climax impacted the world of the story
To act as a “slow curtain”
McKee argues that all stories need at least some kind of ending image to give the audience a chance to catch its breath
Continue reading the other parts of my Story summary:
Part 1: The Decline Of Story
Part 2: The Elements Of Story
Part 3: A Guide To Creating Protagonists
Part 4: How To Design Your Story
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