Robert McKee Quotes

Buscamos lo trágico en lo cómico, lo político en lo personal, lo personal que guía lo político, lo extraordinario detrás de lo usual, lo trivial en lo exaltado.

Cliche is at the root of audience dissatisfaction, and like a plague spread through ignorance, it now infects all story media.

The latter are tedious portraits written in reaction against conflict itself. These writers take the Pollyanna view that life would really be nice… if it weren’t for conflict

What is the worst possible thing that could happen to my protagonist? How could that turn out to be the best possible thing that could happen to him?

There is no such thing as a portable story.

"Sí yo fuera este personaje y en estas circunstancias nuevas, ¿qué haría?". Tras encontrar el camino hasta esa reacción y esa acción, volvemos a salir de ese punto de vista y preguntamos, "¿qué sería lo contrario?"

Pity the poor screenwriter, for he cannot be a poet. He cannot use metaphor and simile, assonance and alliteration, rhythm and rhyme, synecdoche and metonymy, hyperbole and meiosis, the grand tropes. Instead, his work must contain all the substance of literature but not be literary. A literary work is finished and complete within itself. A screenplay waits for the camera. If not literature, what then is the screenwriter's ambition? To describe in such a way that as a reader turns pages, a film flows through the imagination.

The writer works at his skills until knowledge shifts from the left side of the brain to the right,

Story is about thoroughness, not shortcuts.

O público quer saber como é estar vivo na ponta da faca do agora. O que significa ser um ser humano hoje?

They think life is A, B, C, D, E. That’s just when life likes to turn you around, kick you in the butt, and grin: “Not today, my friend. Today it’s E, D, C, B, A. Sorry.” PRINCIPLE

Given the choice between trivial material brilliantly told versus profound material badly told, an audience will always choose the trivial told brilliantly. Master storytellers know how to squeeze life out of the least of things, while poor storytellers reduce the profound to the banal.

Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules.
Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.

There is no such thing as a portable story. An honest story is at home in one, and only one, place and time.

The archetypal story unearths a universally human experience, then wraps itself inside a unique, culture-specific expression. A stereotypical story reverses this pattern: