STORY SEMINAR

No matter how lavish a play’s production, how vivid a novel’s descriptions, how lush a film’s photography, character talk shapes the deepest complexities, ironies and innerness of story. Without expressive dialogue, events lack depth, characters lose dimension, and the telling ultimately falls flat. Learn the multiple purposes of dialogue, cueing from character to character, the differences between effective and weak dialogue, and how to find and fix flaws.

The recent wave of successful horror films speaks to a society suffering tremulous feelings of vulnerability, constant fear and dread, helplessness, paralysis, frustration, and rage. The aim of modern horror is to expiate these emotions with a vicarious experience of damnation, of a fate worse than death. Learn the sources of horror, the hidden worlds within reality, how to create a horror cast, the secret to writing a monster that will terrify your audience, and the creative choices available to the writer in the many horror subgenres.

Anton Chekhov once said, “Everything I know about human nature, I learned from me.” The root of character creation is self-knowledge. The more you penetrate the mysteries of your own humanity, the more you come to understand yourself, and the more you are able to understand others. Discover the symbiotic relationship between writer and character, how to create compelling protagonists, and the secret to maximizing their potential through the cast around them.

A character springs to life the moment we glimpse the fuel that drives them, not only consciously, but subconsciously. Learn the intricacies of character desire and motivation, and how they should be handled in both inner and outer genres. Join McKee at the series conclusion as he presents three vital case studies of the principles in action.

As a writer, you alone have the tools to craft the vehicle that carries us on our search for reality, our best effort to make sense out of the anarchy of existence. And now, more than ever, the world needs your stories. Following the success of his Spring Webinar Program, Robert McKee returns this fall to deliver the crucial insight you need to understand your work in the context of the story universe, to hook and hold the interest of your audience and to lift your story from a good telling, to a work of art.

We create love stories in order to explore, express and experience love from the safe distance of art.
Following the success of his Comedy Webinar Series, Robert McKee returns online this fall with three webinars on the beautiful expression and delightful agony of the Love Story. Learn the history and nature of love, the storytelling principles involved in crafting a love story, and how you can mix and merge genres to create something truly unique.

Comedy is the angry art. It attacks the institutions in the world, social behaviour and the conduct of society. But comedians know that if you harangue people with how awful the world is, no one will listen to you. As a comedy writer, if you can pull the mask away from hypocrisy and greed, expose pretentiousness, stupidity, cruelty for what it is and get people to laugh, then maybe things will balance. In this series of three webinars, Robert McKee dives deep into the nature, principles and structure of this pointed genre.

Action stories are difficult to write well because they have been done so often. Empathy with protagonists in peril provides wonderful excitement to the audience, but audiences know their action stories, and clichés or missed archetypal moments of excitement will disappoint. The Action genre is a specialized and coded story form requiring deep awareness, discipline and a writer who has mastered its principles.

Every writer must strive towards this ideal: Include no scene that doesn’t turn. You must work to round every scene from beginning to end by turning a value at stake in a character’s life from positive to negative, or vice versa. Adherence to this principle may be difficult, but it’s by no means impossible.

The Inciting Incident is the first major incident in your story. At some point, as you write, you will need to answer these questions: How do I set my story in action? Where do I place this crucial event?

Without expressive dialogue, story events lack depth, characters lose dimension, and story flattens. More than any other technique of characterization, dialogue has the power to lift a merely complicated telling into the full array of complexity.

A protagonist and their story can only be as intellectually fascinating and emotionally compelling as the forces of antagonism make them. The more powerful and complex the forces opposing the character, the more completely realized character and story must become.