Story has changed the way I look at books, movies and communication
in general. Using examples from a variety of genres and mediums Mckee goes
through the building blocks of story. He does more than explain the structure
but speaks to the ebb and flow necessary to make a story interesting and
meaningful. Some points stuck out to me.
1. Story
is the backbone of society. It is more than entertainment but how we
communicate with each other. How we tell it, frame it and explicate it is
integral to our worldview.
2. Every character must have a struggle (protagonist may/should have more than one) that you go back and forth between throughout the book. Each scene must be there to put on display a part of that struggle for the character. The reader needs the character to be complex, to almost feel like they are reading about a real person with whom they can share in their hopes and dreams. Scenes that elucidate plot without vacillating between sides of the conflict inside the characters will become boring and tedious. On a value level, this structure turns a plot into an understanding of a human experience as we watch a complex character go through an extreme situation.
3. Stories don’t write themselves. An outline is so important not just for knowing where you are going but for seeing in front of you how your chosen values are being looked upon at different points and how they are progressing. It allows for concentration on what the book is actually about, and not a focus on what will happen next.
While reading the book I noticed how this concept of story being so
vital is extraordinarily far reaching. I first noticed this while on ESPN.com
which is supposed to be a news website about sports, but it isn’t. Here is a
screenshot of the top stories on the website as I am writing this (I could have
chosen any time at all, now happens to be Friday at noon).
Notice how only one,
maybe 1.5 headlines, out of the 11, are actually about sports. “Worldwide
leader in sports”, more like “Worldwide leader in stories related to sports”.
The rest are stories that capture imagination and clicks. I don’t mean to pick
on ESPN.
Here’s the headlines of si.com. They do somewhat better, but its still
mostly stories that are interesting but not sports. In the book, Mckfee writes
how hard it is to make people care about your story. We see so many every day
that they blend together. Making something new, that is worth reading is
incredibly difficult. ESPN and SI go to lengths to get away from the actual
games because nothing in them is new and exciting. So many games have been
played in the past that it makes it difficult to spin them. When they finally
get an exciting one, it is beaten to death. Tim Tebow and Michael Sam are just
two recent examples.
I was curious if this could be true in news reporting as
well. I looked through all the stories the NYT has done on the Israel-Gaza
conflict (found here),
and thought: “What is the best, most interesting story that could have been
written on this topic?” It held true. The take was almost always the more
interesting one, the one that held your attention more. In some ways this is
unsurprising. In order to get readership, you must choose topics they are
interested in. If articles on Israel will get more attention it would behoove a
paper financially to focus more attention onto it. What I am referring to here
though is choosing which side to focus on within the topic. If the NYT has a
clear bias, it’s a story bias. I don’t know what the answer to that is.
Things to think about.
