Robert McKee - Action: The Art of Excitement for Screen, Page, and Game

For tens of thousands of years, our nomadic ancestors celebrated their hand-to-hand, jaw-to-jaw, kill-or-be-killed adventures in firelit dance. As language evolved, epic poets (Homer the most famous) elaborated these mimed exploits into rhymed retellings hundreds of thousands of words long, memorized and recited verbatim. Decades later, scribes committed these massive oral performances to the written word, culminating in masterpieces such as The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Mahabharata, and The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Over the three millennia after Homer, a learned elite sustained the genre with works in both verse and prose such as Beowulf, Njls Saga, The Song of Nibelungs, The Song of Roland, and The Life of al-Zahir Baibars. Finally, literacy, along with the motion picture, penetrated all echelons of society until Action became what it is todaythe worlds most popular storytelling genre.

Our love of Action begins when play becomes adventure. As we go from crawling on all fours to tottering on two to running from room to room, our imaginations transform climbing a flight of stairs into an assault on a fortress; bounding down, an escape from a monster. The living room rug becomes a battleground and toys become heroes and villains. Our imaginations rescue the blameless and punish the bad guys, instinctively acting out the eternal struggle between Good and Evil.

As we age, our love for Action matures, demanding greater and greater innovation. Year in, year out, excellent actioneers not only satisfy our wishes but express their visions with dazzling originality. Indeed, in the hands of the best action creators, the genres conventions greet us like old friends born anew, changed yet unchanged.

Action, because of its popularity, has become one of the most demanding storytelling genres, originality its greatest challenge. In the last century alone, tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of iterations have played out across page, screen, and game. Clichs litter its landscape. Like the prolific genres of Crime and Horror, the immense volume of Action writing has brought it to the saturation point.

How can todays author invent an Action sequence tomorrows fans havent seen or read ad infinitum in the past? How can the modern writer win the ancient war on clichs? How can you create not just a good Action Story but a great one? Action: The Art of Excitement illuminates this challenge and guides the writer to successful originality.