Readings For Writers: Pick of the Week 11/14/14

Every few weeks, a member of the Grub community recommends a book they find helpful or inspirational from a craft perspective. This week, instructor Mark Fogarty recommends his favorite screenwriting book. 

Story by Robert McKee is a book I read over and over again the way some people read the bible, as if with each new read, I will gain a deeper insight. It is a dense, confusing and all-encompassing discussion on storytelling. It is not like most screenwriting books which focus on reducing story to a simple formula, it deals in big and difficult questions about writing.

McKee is famous for running weekend long seminars in which he swears at the audience and angrily proselytizes storytelling as a way of life. (You may remember Brian Cox played him in the film Adaptation, where he viscously browbeat Charlie Kaufman for writing a story where nothing changes).

One passage that deeply resonated with me both in life and in writing is his discussion about the "gap between expectation and reality". The idea is that a person takes an action assuming they will achieve a certain result. In great storytelling there is always a gap between what the person expects to happen and what actually happens. The "gap" is what makes writing interesting. In other words, we always expect the world to act the way we want it to, and it never does, and we never learn. We just keep expecting it to bend to our will, and that is exactly what makes it interesting.

True in screenwriting and true in life.

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