![]() I've been waiting for the professors of English literature to start throwing stones at me, because this is not how literature is normally taught. The writer of the first-person novel has all the typical problems that writers have when writing a particular scene, but 50,000 words of it. If that's the definition, then first-person novels are 50,000 words of nonstop dialogue. I define dialogue as anything said by any character to anyone. The conventional definition of dialogue is two characters talking to one another. The book is radical because I redefine dialogue. ![]() You have me thinking about dialogue in a way I've never considered it before. The Dialogue audiobook requires more of my attention because it's advanced content. The Story audiobook feels like an abridged version of your seminars. ![]() I've been listening to the audiobook, as well… It teaches me how to think critically about modes of dialogue. Yeah, I think that's what is really exceptional about the book. One of the reasons why people have trouble with Dialogue is that they assume it's for screenwriting, but when they pick it up, they realize they've got to think like novelists and playwrights.įirst-person novels are 50,000 words of nonstop dialogue. When I got to write Dialogue-along with the books I'll write in the future, like the next one I'll write will be on character-I wrote about page, stage, and screen. Everything I say about stories and say about film in fact is true for them." She agreed. We can put that in a subtitle, but I'm going to call it Story to encourage playwrights and novelists to read it. She wanted it to be called Screenwriting, but I said, "No. Robert McKee: When I wrote Story, my publisher and I had a bit of an argument about the title. VICE: Although you're best known in the screenwriting world, Dialogue isn't really a book fits on a shelf next to Save the Cat or How to Write a Movie in 21 Days. It's the book that will solidify McKee's place as more than just a screenwriting guru-he's an anthropologist of narrative, more Aristotle than Syd Field. The similarly bluntly titled book is an exhaustive breakdown of the different ways speech can be used in novels, theater, and cinema it's one that trains you to look at dialogue in different ways as you read. Robert McKee released Story's long-awaited follow-up, Dialogue, last summer. He may be best known in Hollywood, but his close study of narrative should be required reading for storytellers of any kind. McKee's main focus is dissecting well-told stories, unpacking them piece by piece, and figuring out how they do what they do. The book isn't interested in teaching readers how to write a successful screenplay. Sure, his seminars primarily focus on narrative in film and Story's subtitle promises the "principles of screenwriting," but there's a reason it is simply called Story. ![]() Each book promising to teach movie writing from Syd Field's Screenplay to Save the Cat has been met with doomsdayers who say the art form is going to be spoiled by screenwriting teachers forever.īut Robert McKee isn't a screenwriting teacher. It's a complaint about McKee that isn't unique to Adaptation, or even to McKee himself. Cage-as-Kaufman bristles at the lessons, worried that McKee is ushering in a homogenization of screenwriting, a kind of formulaic "chicken in every pot, point of no return at every midpoint"–style of writing that will turn all movies into paint-by-numbers. In Adaptation, Nic Cage plays a fictionalized version of Charlie Kaufman who, struggling to write his new script, winds up at a McKee seminar in search of something that'll get him through his third act.
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