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New York and London Story Seminars
Video:
Story Seminar Trailer
Over four 10-hour days Robert McKee teaches the substance,
structure, style, and principles of story. This seminar has
become a rite of passage for writers.
With his method, with talent, and with hard work, writers gain insight into the truths they have to share and learn how to thrill, touch, and delight audiences through films, novels, plays, journalism, game design, and increasingly varied other forms of story. |
April 3 - 6
New York City, NY April 24 - 27 London, England |
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New York Genre Festival 2014
The only North American performance of the year.
Video:
Genre Festival Introduction
After choosing your medium as a writer or story creator, your second greatest decision will always be genre. That decision will determine your audience, your platform and – in many cases – the course of your career. Each story genre has a distinct purpose. To write well you must first understand the reason for your genre and its conventions. Why? Because the audience is smart and knows their genres.
Satisfy your audience. Learn your genre. Robert McKee teaches four separate Genre Days, diving into the substance, structure, style and principles of each genre. The fifth and final day of the festival, TV Day, covers the structure and characters of television series, which often draw from the genres of the four previous days (leading some attendees to dub the seminar TV WEEK). See below for a description of the five seminar days, including the introduction of the new ACTION Day and the US Premiere of TV Day. |
April 9 - 13
New York City, NY |
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Thriller
- The Art of Suspense
Day 1: Wednesday, April 9, 2014
This intensive day session will dismantle the conventions and techniques of one of the world's most enduring dramatic forms – the Thriller – thus enabling you to both read this genre more profoundly and write your next story utilizing its inherent power. Conventional Crime stories play upon the audience's fears of lawlessness, violence, and death. The intellectual puzzles of creating and solving a perfect crime, breaking and scattering clues, and misleading attention delight audiences. But the Thriller goes deeper. It reaches into the audience's unconscious mind to arouse the gripping fear of a fate worse than death, a fate that would make you beg for oblivion.
The key to this intense terror is the writer's creation of an extreme offset of power between the victim protagonist and the ruthless spirit of evil lurking within the antagonist. The greater this imbalance, the greater the thrill in the Thriller. |
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Comedy
- The Angry Art
Day 2: Thursday, April 10, 2014
Comedy Day is a rare opportunity to understand this core genre from the inside out. As Jack London once noted, comedy is the toughest, but also the most rewarded story form. This deep dive into the form's nature and potential will equip you to tackle almost half of the film world's projected properties. Simply put, a Comedy is a funny story, an elaborate rolling joke of twist-filled events. While wit lightens a telling, it alone will not make a true comedy. Rather, wit often creates hybrids such as a Dramedy (BRIDESMAIDS) or the Crimedy (BEVERLY HILLS COP).
You know you've written a true comedy when you sit an innocent victim down and pitch your story. Just tell him what happens, without quoting witty dialogue or sight gags, and see if he laughs. If, every time you turn the scene he laughs, until by the end of the pitch you have him collapsed on the floor, you've written a Comedy. If he doesn't laugh, you've written…something else. |
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Love Story
- The Art of the Heart
Day 3: Friday, April 11, 2014
"There is no enterprise which is started with such tremendous hopes and high expectations and yet fails so often as love." – Erich Fromm
Feelings of love are genetically imposed on us in order to ensure reproductive success. Love behavior functions to attract the mate, retain a mate, reproduce with your mate, and mutually raise and support offspring. But if love were simply a response to generic programing, any creature that mates for life must be in love for life. Vultures, termites, and anglerfish mate for life, but is that love? Genetics alone can never account for the complex emotional needs, profound desires, and romantic rituals that embrace human beings, all of which can be beautifully expressed via the delightful agony of the Love Story. This dedicated session will address the timeless codes of this genre, enabling you to identify and innovate its dramatic conventions. Robert McKee shares a lifetime of narrative insight into a story form that continues to drive publication and performance across books, films and TV. |
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Action
- The Art of Excitement
Day 4: Saturday, April 12, 2014
Drama itself is action, as per the Greek origin of the word, but the highly kinetic Action genre is a specialized and coded story form requiring deep awareness and discipline. In this intensive session, Robert McKee will share the goals, tools and secrets of Action so you can capture and sustain attention. The Action Story is so hard to write well because it has been done so often. Empathy with protagonists in a danger zone provides wonderful excitement to the audience. But audiences know their action stories, and clichés or missed moments of excitement will disappoint.
The scene with the protagonist at the mercy of the villain, for instance, expresses the nature of the hero. When the hero, overpowered and with her back to the wall, finds a way to outmaneuver the villain, we experience the complete expression of the hero. There are no rules, but there are conventions based on principles, and you must understand these principles to create great action stories, whether you would use them or break them. |
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TV Day
- The Art of the Long Form
Day 5: Sunday, April 13, 2014
With the maturation of the internet, story on television is entering a completely new era – its Golden Age. The all-new TV Day takes advantage of this new paradigm by bringing you the tools and skills to master its challenges. Robert McKee says that if he were a young writer he would work in TV, which has progressed farther than the big screen in recognizing the importance of writers and in giving them creative power. This is why the today's best writing is on TV.
The genres of Genre Week are the content of television – Thriller/Crime, Comedy, Love Stories, and Action. But modern television is the evolution of the epic poem, begging for characters complex enough to sustain 100 hours of story. A TV series contains hundreds of acts and thousands of scenes. The art of the long form is an art all to itself. |
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Introduction to Genre Theory
Bassim El-Wakil outlines some of the primary genres and discusses how they are deployed by writers to manage the expectations of the audience.
A close collaborator of Robert McKee, Bassim El-Wakil has devoted many years to exploring and illuminating the spectrum of story genres. His findings will not only boost your smarts in any chosen genre, but expose hidden narrative potential in your current story project. Here, we open up the Storylogue archives to provide you with Part 1 of his lesson series on Genre Theory. For the rest of the series, and for more great lessons on the theory and practice of writing, visit www.storylogue.com.
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A text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without a genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genre-less text.
- Jacques Derrida |
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The Early Bird Catches the Worm. We all know the moral of that story. Don't miss out on the only Story in Business Seminar in 2014. |
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Story in Business
Created for business professionals, Robert McKee's Complete Use of STORY-in-BUSINESS Seminar teaches storytelling in all commercial contexts. McKee's Purpose-Told Story—a story told to trigger action—inspires the listener to buy, to partner, to invest. From elevator pitches to grand international marketing strategies, McKee's STORY-in-BUSINESS method triggers positive action by using the human voice of Story.
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September 26
New York City, NY |
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Be Robert McKee's next award-winning writer. |
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Get Inspired... Watch Trailer |
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