Venkatesh Rao

There is something exhausting/deadening about Robert McKee’s storytelling material. It discourages rather than encourages me. He clearly knows his stuff, and it’s all solidly thought through, but I can’t shake the sense that he’s missing the essence of what stories are to me.

One sign is that I have near zero attraction towards 90% of the stories he cites as exemplars, and there’s very low overlap between what he likes/recommends and what I consume. Both screen and page. Not sure what to make of this.

I’ve only watched 11 of the 33 movies he cites a lot in Story (which I read long ago), and none of them is anywhere near my favorites list. https://mrm.ua/uploads/assets/files/RobertMcKeeMovies_en.pdf …

By contrast, I really enjoyed Steve Kaplan’s comedy book, and took his seminar (never took McKee’s much more famous one, though I might try to post-Covid) and more importantly his core example, Groundhog Day, is one of my favorites too.

His new book Dialogue was better for me than Story. Got a lot more out of it and took extensive notes. Still, it was a slog. He’s apparently working in a third book on character.

Yes, I definitely liked Saved by the Cat. I have Vogler’s book, but didn’t get into it (I like the idea of Hero’s Journey sub field of narrative theory, but not the practice of it).https://twitter.com/shloky/status/1346601951933427712 …

I have a shelf full of books on storytelling, and I tend to use them more as a reference source for my thinking/writing about temporality than my own fiction attempts. So I guess I have a double-dip interest in the topic.

What I’d really like in terms of learning fiction writing? Make a list of my own top 50 books/movies/tv shows, then get a teacher who also likes them. But it’s rare for scholars of story to share my tastes. It’s more likely they’d want to murder me for liking the wrong things.