The Terminology of Story Design
Lesson from "Story" by Robert McKee
When crafting a story, the writer seeks events. The mark of a master is to select only a few moments but give us a lifetime.
Structure - A selection of events from the characters’ life stories that is composed into a strategic sequence to arouse specific emotions and to express a specific view of life.
An event is caused by or affects people, thus delineating characters; it takes place in a setting, generating image, action, and dialogue; it draws energy from conflict producing emotion in characters and audience alike.
“Event” means change.
If the streets outside your window are dry, but after a nap they’re wet, you assume an event has taken place, called rain. The world outside changed from dry to wet.
Story Events are meaningful, not trivial. To make change meaningful, it must happen to a character.
For example: If you see someone drenched in a downpour, this has more meaning than the sole image of a damp street.
Story Event - A meaningful change in the life situation of a character that is expressed and experienced in terms of value.
Values are the soul of storytelling. Ultimately ours is the art of expressing to the world a perception of values.
Values - The universal qualities of human experience that may shift from positive to negative, or negative to positive, from one moment to the next.
For example: alive/dead (positive/negative), is a story value, as are love/hate, freedom/slavery, truth/lie, courage/cowardice, loyalty/betrayal, wisdom/stupidity, strength/weaknesses, excitement/boredom.
All such binary qualities of experience that can reverse their charge at any moment are Story Values. They may be moral (good/evil), ethical (right/wrong), or simply charged with value.
But a story cannot be built out of nothing but accidental events, no matter how charged with value. There must be conflict in your story.
A story event creates meaningful change in the life situation of a characters this expressed and experiences in terms of a value and achieved through conflict.
For a typical film, the writer will choose forty to sixty story events or, as they’re commonly known, scenes. (A novelist may want more than sixty, a playwright rarely as many as forty.)
Scene - An action through conflict in more or less continuous time and space that turns the value-charged condition of a character’s life on at least one value with a degree of perceptible significance.
Ideally, every scene is a story event.
If exposition is a scene’s sole justification, a disciplined writer will trash it and weave its information into the film elsewhere.
No scene that doesn’t turn. We work to round every scene from beginning to end by turning a value at stake in a character’s life from the positive to the negative (or from the negative to the positive).
Characters can change location during a scene because the ending of a scene is identified by a transfer of values.
Inside the scene is the smallest element of structure, the beat (not to be confused with [beat], an indication within a column of dialogue meaning “short pause”).
Beat - An exchange of behavior in action/reaction.
Beat by beat, these changing behaviors shape the turning of a scene.
For example: A scene could built around six beats, six distinctively different behaviors, six clear changes of action/reaction: teasing each other, followed by insults, then threatening and daring each other, next pleading and ridiculing, and finally exchanges of violence that lead to the last beat and turning point: a character’s decision to end the relationship. It takes the couple from the positive (in love and together) to the negative (in hate and apart).
Beats build scenes. Scenes then build sequences.
Sequence - A series of scenes (generally two to five) that culminates with greater impact than any previous scene.
Here’s an example of a three-scene sequence:
A woman decides she’ll go to a job interview on Manhattan’s East Side (Doubt/Negative —> Confidence/Positive)
She realizes she’ll have to run through the dangerous part of Central Park to get there (Death/Negative) but makes it out alive (Alive/Positive)
Arriving a the party, the rain ruins her makeup (Defeat/Negative) but she still interviews and gets the job (Success/Positive)
Scenes turn in minor but significant ways; a series of scenes builds a sequences that turns in a moderate, more impactful way; a series of sequences builds the next largest structure, the act.
Act - A series of sequences that peaks in a climactic scene which causes a major reversal of values.
A series of acts builds the largest structure of all: the story.
A story is simply one huge master event (or “change”). When you look at the value-charged in the life of the character at the beginning, then compare it to the value-charge at the end, you should see the arc of the story.
Arc - The great sweep of change that takes life from one condition at the beginning to a changed condition at the end.
The change at the end must be absolute and irreversible. Change caused by a scene could be reversed. Scene by sequence by act, the writer creates minor, moderate, and major change. But the climax of the last act cannot be changed.
Story Climax - A story is a series of acts that build to a last act climax or story climax which brings about absolute and irreversible change.
Make your beats build scenes, scenes build sequences, sequences build acts, acts build story to its climax.
Beats —> Scenes —> Sequences —> Acts (—> Story Climax, or “the last act’s climax”)
Let every phrase of dialogue or line of description either turn behavior and action or set up the conditions for change.
Continuing our job interview in New York City example:
The woman could end up becoming president for the company and the story could arc from optimistic young professional to cynical executive— absolute, irreversible change.
This was a lesson from Story by Robert McKee.
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