How to write a director's story

If you major in choreography, if you like stories, and if you want to write your own stories, you can't miss The Story.

Yes, the book we are going to share with you today is called Story, and it has a subtitle called "Principles of Material, Structure, Style and Screenplay".

Just like there are basic music theory books in the world of music, this book can be said to be a professional basic book in the field of story creation.

Let's first introduce the author of this book, robert mckee, who is a mature writer, director, playwright and writing tutor. He once served as a tutor in the "Story" training class of the University of California. The book Story is the essence of Mr. McKee's many years of writing instruction courses. Known as the "Hollywood evangelist", McKee has been a professional consultant for Disney, Fox and other institutions for a long time, and has a unique understanding and guidance method for story creation. Among the students he has coached, as many as 35 have won the Oscar.

In order to better explain this story, here, I deconstruct this book into the following three parts.

The first part is: what is the story made of-mainly about how to look at the story from a professional perspective;

The second part is: story creation begins with breaking the balance-mainly telling the core method of story creation, which is the key content of this book;

The third part is "The Creative Code of Being an Excellent Creator", which mainly summarizes some requirements for excellent creators in the book and encourages everyone.

Let's start with the first part.

The first part is: What is the story made of?

What's the story?

It can be the mark left by ancient humans on the stone, the narrative of a bard by a campfire, the narrative of a mother in front of her child's bed, and the familiar novels, plays, TV plays, movies and so on.

Stories have always existed in human life, and the demand for stories is our oldest and deepest desire.

Story creation can be said to be a long-standing craft, and not everyone can create wonderful stories. To be an excellent story creator, you need to know what the story is before you create it.

In life, many people are used to equating stories with literature, but literature is only a means of expression of stories. To understand what a story is, we must know the general structure of the story, which is only one part of the story.

From small to large, the components of a story are beat, event, sequence, behavior and story.

Among them, the beat is the smallest structural unit of the story. As long as you understand the beat, you will naturally understand other components.

The word beat is more commonly used in music theory, indicating the conversion of speed or strength between notes. So what does the beat in the story mean?

In the story, the beat refers to the turning point of value, which can be from sadness to happiness, from happiness to sadness, from calm to excitement, from questioning to affirmation, that is, all emotions change from positive to negative or from negative to positive. If the characters in the story are happy before action, for example, before eating, they are also happy after action (after eating).