A Story Can't Be Verbatim

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"A storyteller is a life poet, an artist who transforms day-to-day living, inner life and outer life, dream and actuality into a poem whose rhyme scheme is events rather than words—a two hour metaphor that says: Life is like this Therefore, a story must abstract from life to discover its essences, but not become an abstraction that loses all sense of life-as-lived.  A story must be like life, but not so verbatim that it has no depth or meaning beyond what’s obvious to everyone on the street."

- Robert McKee. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principals of Screenwriting. ReganBooks: New York, 1997. pg 25