February 5, 2023
Drove down into the Beast on Saturday morning and had breakfast with Kathy Sue's siblings at Gallo Blanco on Pierce. I had the migas, Kath had the huevos rancheros.
Came home and found this guy, doing his job.
It took me some time, but I finally finished "Story" by Robert McKee and here are my takeaways.
Lessons Learned
• "Story isn't a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality, our best effort to make sense out of the anarchy of existence."
• "All stories, honest and dishonest, wise and foolish, faithfully mirror their maker, exposing his humanity, or lack of it."
• [You must embrace] "The love of duality—a feel for life's hidden contradictions, a healthy suspicion that things are not what they seem."
• "Story is not life in actuality. Mere occurrence brings us nowhere near the truth. What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens."
• "The first step toward a well-told story is to create a small, knowable world."
• "A story is not an accumulation of information strung into a narrative, but a design of events to carry us to a meaningful climax."
• "A story well told gives you the very thing you cannot get from life: a meaningful emotional experience."
• "For the purpose of story a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility."
• "The music of story is conflict."
• "If the scene is about what the scene is about, you're in deep shit."
—Robert McKee
Fifty Years Ago, National Lampoon
Classic Cover
"History is the symptom, we are the disease."
—Mao Tse-tung
I recall that issue had the PLAYDEAD interview with "Bonanza's" Dan Blocker.
ReplyDeleteAnd this ditty:
You can rig a sailboat,
You can rig an election,
You can rig a tortoise.
But you can't rigor mortis!