“Story is metaphor for life. It takes us beyond the factual to the essential.” Robert McKee
While McKee's comments refer to screenwriting primarily and storytelling generally, I see huge benefit in considering storytelling in all areas of communication.
The narrative approach is huge in inter-cultural communication, as a counselling technique and in communicating spiritual principles. Name a master storyteller. What was the overriding message behind their stories? Often we can narrow that down to one major focus.
“Story designs are powerfully charged with meaning. The storyteller’s selection and arrangement of events is his master metaphor for the interconnectedness of all the levels of reality - personal, political, environmental, spiritual...our appetite for story is a reflection of the profound human need to grasp the patterns of living, not merely as an intellectual exercise, but within a very personal, emotional experience...a culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling.”
McKee’s attitude is that storytelling in our society has become an under-rated and debased skill, and only when story telling is respected and valued in its rightful place does it reflect a healthy society. He is a pragmatic idealist and his philosophical and moral base is that all storytelling must be good entertainment, and that all storytelling is much more than entertainment. Storytelling in all its forms is the method by which the values of a culture are transmitted. “The art of story is the dominant cultural force in the world, and the art of film is the dominant medium in this grand enterprise.”
Reviewed by Dara McNaught of the New Zealand Writer's Guild.
McKees second, but not secondary, emphasis is on character development. "The revelation of deep character in contrast or contradiction to characterization is fundamental in major characters. Minor roles may or may not need hidden dimensions, but principals must be written in depth – they cannot be at heart what they seem to be at face."
Structure and Character Functions
Excerpted from Robert McKee’s, STORY: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, Mehuen, 1998.
The function of STRUCTURE is to provide progressively building pressures that force characters into more and more difficult dilemmas where they must make more and more difficult risk-taking choices and actions, gradually revealing their true natures, even down to the unconscious self.
The function of CHARACTER is to bring to the story the qualities of characterization necessary to convincingly act out choices. Put simply, a character must be credible: young enough or old enough, strong or weak, worldly or naive, educated or ignorant, generous or selfish, witty or dull, in the right proportions. Each must bring to the story the combination of qualities that allows an audience to believe that the character could and would do what he does.
The power of storytelling! The pictures it paints. The way it can stir the heart when other forms leave us stagnant.
Reckon that's why so many of us are going to the movies?
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