Robert McKee

Robert McKee (born 1941), is a creative writing instructor who is widely known for his popular "Story Seminar", which he developed when he was a professor at the University of Southern California. McKee is the author of a "screenwriters' bible" called Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. Online, McKee has a blog and a writers' resource website called "Storylogue".

McKee's "Story Seminar" runs twice yearly in New York, Los Angeles, and London, and about once yearly in other major cities worldwide including Amsterdam, Beijing, Mumbai, Paris, and Rio de Janeiro. The seminar covers how story fits the human mind, from the philosophical to the structural. McKee's one-day "Genre Seminars", often held 5 days in a row, delve into the conventions of the Thriller, the Comedy, the Love Story, the Action Story, and Television.

Rather than simply handling "mechanical" aspects of fiction technique such as plot or dialogue taken individually, McKee examines the narrative structure of a work and what makes a story compelling or not. This could work equally as well as an analysis of any other genre or form of narrative, whether in screenplay or any other form, and could also encompass nonfiction works as long as they attempt to "tell a story".