The archetypal story unearths a universally human experience, then wraps itself inside a unique, culture-specific expression. A stereotypical story r… - Robert McKee

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.

If the scene is about what the scene is about, you’re in deep shit.

A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.