Notes from:

McKee, Robert. (1997). ‘The Substance of Story.’ In S​tory: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting.​New York, USA: HarperCollins, pp. 135-154.

• All artists can lay hands on the raw materials of their art – except the writer.” Language and words are only a medium for storytelling – something more profound is the heart of the story.
• How do stories compel such intense mental and sentient attention from the audience?
• Plural protagonist: all individuals in the group share the same desire. If one has a success, they all do. If one has a setback, they all suffer.
• Multiprotagonist: characters pursue separate, individual desires; suffering and benefitting individually
• Multiprotagonist stories become multi-plot stories – they weave together smaller stories.
• Anything that can be given free will and the capacity to desire, take action and suffer the consequences can be a protagonist.
• The protagonist is a willful character
  • A story cannot be made about a protagonist that doesn’t want anything, who cannot make decisions, whose actions effect no change at any level.
• The protagonist has a conscious desire
  • The protagonist has a goal and knows what he/she wants.
• The protagonist may also have a self-contradictory unconscious desire
  • The audience can sense this unconscious desire even if the protagonist cannot.
• The protagonist must have an appropriate characterization.
  • He needs the right balance of qualities to pursue his desires.
  • He needs to be believable and realistic. The audience needs to believe that they could see the protagonist doing what he is doing.
• There must be hope: the audience must believe that the protagonist has a chance to achieve his desire.
  • A hopeless protagonist will not interest the audience.
• No matter how intimate or epic the setting, instinctively the audience draws a circle around the character and their world, a circumference of experience that’s defined by the nature of the fictional reality. The audience expects the storyteller to take the story to those distant depths and ranges.
• A story has to build to a final action after which the audience cannot imagine another.
  • If people leave and imagine scenes that should have happened, they won’t be as fulfilled. Not all their questions were answered and their emotions aren’t satisfied.
  • This doesn’t mean there can’t be a sequel. It just means that the story must have closure.
• The protagonist must be empathetic, he may or may not be sympathetic (i.e. likeable).
  • We need to find a shared humanity within the protagonist. There needs to be something about the character which strikes a chord, and when it does, it means that we want the protagonist to achieve what they are setting out to do.
  • This maintains the audience/story bond.

The Audience Bond

• Empathy is the glue for this bond
• When we empathize with a protagonist and his desire, we are in fact rooting for our own desires.
• It doesn’t matter if a protagonist is pleasant or not – the main hero doesn’t have to be a nice guy.