The Enduring Art of Story

[Please note, this post, like every post at AlexandraAmor.com, was written by a human – me! – Alexandra Amor.]

Memoirists are storytellers. Even when we’re writing about something that happened to us, we need to approach the telling of that story with many of the same tools that fiction writers use. In this article I talk about how I’ve been influenced by the exceptional storytelling abilities of the creators at Pixar Animation Studio, particularly Andrew Stanton, and I link to an inspirational interview with him.

Learning About Writing from Animated Films

I’ve been a Pixar nerd from the mid-90s when the first Toy Story movie came out. (Number five in the series was just released. I haven’t seen it yet but can’t wait.) Monster’s Inc, in 2001, was when I really got hooked. Something about the cleverness of the idea (monsters who train to be scary and who enter kids’ bedrooms through magic closet doors) and the message behind the story (that love is stronger than fear) wrapped itself around my heart.

As a writer, I became obsessed with knowing everything about the people behind these films from a storytelling perspective. They seemed to be tapped into a vein of storytelling genius and I wanted to know everything they knew.

I asked for David Price’s book, The Pixar Touch, for Christmas the year it was released. I pinned Pixar’s 22 rules of storytelling up in my office. I read every article I could find about the storytellers behind the movies and listened with care to what they said about story and creativity.

Story is King

I remember a clip from an interview with John Lasseter, one of the founding members of the studio, where he said one of the driving ethos’ at Pixar is, “Story is king.” In other words, trends in animation may come and go, and splashy visual effects might attract short-term attention, but good storytelling lasts. Focus on the story because that’s what will reach audiences and touch them.

Andrew Stanton is another one of the founding members of Pixar and this past weekend I stumbled across an interview with him on a YouTube channel. It is an interview packed with wisdom about storytelling, and I want to recommend it here. I’ve embedded it below.

Stanton is the writer/director behind Finding Nemo, Wall-E, and A Bug’s Life. He has also contributed, one way or another, to most of Pixar’s other films. He has a great way with metaphors to explain how stories work and I heard a couple new ones in this interview.

Writing Tips from a Screenwriter

In addition to his metaphors, in the interview he shares about:

• How a character’s core drive keeps a story moving and keeps readers (or viewers) interested
• Embracing the process of rewriting, noting that he often doesn’t get a story right until seven, eight or nine drafts have been written
• Using a one-sentence premise to capture the theme of a story
• Being willing to write bad sentences so that you can get to the good one. This tip aligns with the classic ‘you can’t fix a blank page’ adage
• How silent films inform the writers at Pixar
• How one change to the structure of a story, in this case Finding Nemo, can rescue a story that isn’t working. (That story begins at about the 32 minute mark.)

If you’re a story nerd, I highly recommend listening to or watching this interview.

Oh! One final bit of helpful info. The two books Stanton mentions are:

• The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri
• How Not to Write a Screenplay by Denny Martin Flinn

Happy writing and creating!

_{This post, like every post at AlexandraAmor.com, was written by a human – me! – Alexandra Amor.}