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Sounds fascinating!

I do wonder, however, about his sound-bite that "the unlived life is not worth examining".

All life is, of necessity, lived. All life merits examination.

I doubt if McKee is suggesting that there is no story in the potential lives of aborted children. I doubt if Beckett would have agreed that there is nothing to examine in lives lived at even a minimum level of action and thought.

Did he expatiate?

Looking forward to your ever-more keenly honed blogs in the future.

John Wayne "Truly this man was the Son of God" from "The Greatest Story ever Told"

"The unexamined life is not worth living,' said Socrates"

Forgetting who said it except that it was a philosopher and taken at its face value, as I've said before about it, this is as self serving a statement as I can imagine. What it says in effect is study with me so I can tell you what life means or you might just as well have never been born.

"The unlived life is not worth examining"

Catchy but trite. Hardly clever IMO. How can a life be unlived? If you have not lived, you are not alive. Had he said the uneventful life is not worth telling then it would have made sense. Is that what he meant? The first thing a storyteller or anyone else should do is make his meaning clear. People in all cultures including many who are regarded as masters in the art have been telling stories to each other since humanity invented language, maybe before with gestures and cave paintings. And this guy is going to give the world the inside track on how it should be done correctly in three days. Give me a break Mr. Crawley.

Puritan, it's a good job they didn't use the version in Luke "Certainly this man was innocent!" but then maybe this was one of those rare areas where Luke the "historian" got a detail right that the other two synoptics got wrong.

Anyone for donkeys?

Here, Sunboy,

You're probably familiar with the way some Christians pull a bible verse or two out of some sort of magical, mystical evangelical hat and then make a big deal of it, but you doing it to 'prove' contradictions, gosh, I'm disappointed.

Yes, Christians have a way of doing things like that.

I personally prefer J. Michael Straczynski's book on scriptwriting- and no, it's not because I'm a Babylon 5 fan. (I'm not.) Straczynski does a great job at setting out all the various types of scripts, and the ways in which they are used. (Though he focuses less on story than on script...)

Orville, or Syd Field's book, which is perhaps one of the best known, up there with McKee's. I'd love to have been there at this seminar; it'd have been very useful to me in some of the work I'm doing at the moment. But, hell, in the end it's perhaps most important to be a lover of the screen, to have a story to tell and to have read a lot of screenplays before attempting to write one.