I’m rereading McKee’s bible of screenwriting, Story, to tighten up a script I’m working on. Some of it is helpful, some of it not…
What is especially not helpful: I don’t quite know what I was thinking, but I bought a used copy which has had at least 4 previous users from the look of the various pricing stickers.
Usually when I buy a used textbook I flip through it… but this time I must have neglected that step, because the margins are filled with the most insipid notes and observations imaginable.
Some of them are simple ignorance, like the circled word “triptych” and a question mark. Others are clearly someone trying to summarize something to get through the chapter for a class; except it’s clear they are picking phrases at random and not really internalizing anything. Some chapters have every topic sentence of every paragraph underlined. I remember seeing biology books like this, where literally every word which was not an article had been highlighted.
McKee name-drops Heidegger and Sarte, and the reader has underlined the entire paragraph and written “Heidegger” and “Sarte” in the margin. Yeah, uh, I didn’t quite understand these two sentences in this paragraph, so I’m going to attempt to summarize all of Heidegger to cater to McKee.
Bah!