Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling

Scripts guidelines help storytelling. First Loony Tunes, now Pixar. The animated world has rules. Perhaps it's related to Walt Disney's comment that he liked animated features because he could control everything. He didn't need to deal with unruly actors.

Here  are Pixar's 22 Rules. Way more than Roadrunner's 9 or Bonanza's 7. 

#1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.
#2: You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.
#3: Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.
#4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.
#5: Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.
#6: What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
#7: Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.
#8: Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.
#9: When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.
#10: Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.
#11: Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.
#12: Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.
#13: Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.
#14: Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.
#15: If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.
#16: What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.
#17: No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later.
#18: You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.
#19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.
#20: Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?
#21: You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?
#22: What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.

Click to see Pixar's 23 Years 

Happy Independence Day

I hope everybody has a great day. One of my favorite July 4th celebrations was in 1976, the bicentennial. On a lark (or perhaps it was a inebriated neighborhood party), our street decided to enter a float in the bicentennial parade. We'd be competing against businesses and established organizations like the VFW and Shriners. The photo above shows my wife and son standing in front of our 1st Place float. (Hey, come on, it wasn't the Rose Parade.) Great memories. It drew the neighborhood together and we had a rowdy celebration with all the BBQ grills gathered in one back yard with kids running around everywhere.

If you want to read about an even older celebration, here is a description of the Independence Day gala in Philadelphia during the Constitutional Convention.  Before the snarky comments arrive, I wasn't actually at that celebration. At least, not physically. I did kinda visit when I wrote the piece.

Happy 4th of July. 

A Milestone of Sorts

Today I hit a milestone. I received my 1,000th customer review. Those are reviews where the reader actually wrote at least a few words. Barnes and Noble, Goodreads and others allow a simple rating on a scale of 1 to 5. I have over 1,600 of the ratings variety of criticism, but I prefer reading about why the reader liked or disliked my book.

The 1,000 word reviews are across all eight of my books, so the nicely rounded number doesn’t allow me to open a good bottle of Champagne. (Don’t have one, anyway.) 718 of the reviews are on Amazon for a 4.4 average rating. That made me feel good until I wandered over to Goodreads. There I found 245 reviews for an average of 3.8 stars. Actually, this doesn’t bother me at all. Goodreads always trends lower than Amazon. Besides, I trust Goodreads reviews because they made an effort to visit the site without a prompting email. (The remaining reviews appear on Barnes & Noble and Apple iBooks.)

What have I learned from reading all these reviews? Gosh, maybe not a thing. I certainly haven’t changed my writing. As I think back, the middle-of-the-road reviews have been the most useful to me. They usually liked the book, but had a reservation about one thing or another. Those reservations have tilted my writing to a degree.

I like reviews. And I appreciate readers who take the time to give me some feedback. So … thank you to all who read my books and an extra thank you to those who post a review. 

Characters Matter

Characterization is a crucial aspect of fiction. We know this because it's drilled into us at school, in workshops, and in all the how-to books and journals we read. The protagonist must come across as real and interesting enough to pull the reader all the way through to the end of the story. A common mistake, however, is to focus too much attention on the protagonist. When you read a great book or watch an outstanding film, it's usually the antagonist that lifts the story above the ordinary.

A favorite villain: Frank in Once Upon a Time in the West

Protagonists, especially those of the heroic breed, are bound by rules and common perceptions that somewhat inhibit creativity. Antagonists, on the other hand, are wide open for manipulation. They can be bad to the bone like Hannibal Lector or Chigurh. They can be nasty or evil, but mend their wayward ways like Ebenezer Scrooge or Darth Vader. The reader may be misdirected to believe the antagonist is bad and then everything is flipped around like with Boo Radley and Mr. Darcy. 

Antagonists can make a story memorable even when they are not even human, like Moby Dick or Christine. The one thing these antagonists all have in common is great character development.

Concentration on character development shouldn't stop with the protagonist and antagonist. Nobody willingly hangs around with boring people and nobody wants to read about characters with cornmeal personalities—not even the bit players. Everybody inside the covers of your book has to be interesting. Give each of them a distinct personality. If you have a character like a postman or waitress that appears only for a couple pages, don't slow down the story by describing their personality, show it. You need to do it with dress, movement, or dialogue. Show, don't tell, is more difficult with the brevity of a minor player, but you only need to spice the character enough to make him or her three dimensional.

A fictional work has a single writer with a single personality. If you populate your work with slight variations of yourself, you'll create a homogeneous universe that will bore people silly. A writer must suppress their own personality when developing characters so they are all different from each other. It's not enough that they look and talk different—they must think and act differently. They must be different people.

The fiction writer's personality will show up in the total work, but it's best if it's not directly reflected in the characters, especially the protagonist or antagonist. Have fun with these two. Make them unique from yourself and every other character in your work. This is especially true for the antagonist. 

A really good bad guy or gal gives a hero a reason to be heroic.

9 Golden rules for the Road Runner and Coyote

Chuck Jones created 9 Golden rules for the Road Runner cartoons. These famous rules insured that fans received exactly what they expected from these Loony Tunes characters. First the rules, and then some storytelling lessons we can draw from this popular series. 

Rule 1. The Road Runner cannot harm the coyote except by going “beep, beep!”
Rule 2. No outside force can harm the coyote—only his own ineptitude or the failure of the Acme products
Rule 3. The coyote can stop anytime—if he were not a fanatic. (Repeat: “A fanatic is one who redoubles his efforts when he has forgotten his aim.” George Santayana)
Rule 4. No dialogue ever, except “Beep Beep!”
Rule 5. The Road Runner must stay on the road—otherwise logically he would not be called Road Runner.
Rule 6. All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters—the Southwest American desert.
Rule 7. All material, tools, weapons, or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the Acme Corporation.
Rule 8. Whenever possible, make gravity the coyote’s greatest enemy.
Rule 9. The coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.

Chuck's handwritten rules

Previously, I published the 7 rules for the television series Bonanza. Television series, movie franchises, and even cartoons need a list of dos and don’ts so the characters and action remain consistency from episode to episode. Book series need the same. The protagonist must remain true to his or her character and the plot cannot go too far afield without losing fans. If you write a series, or even a single novel, write down the plot and character rules. This little exercise brings clarity and dependability to stories.

There are additional lessons to be gleaned from the Road Runner and Coyote. All stories revolve around an antagonist making life difficult for the protagonist. Different stories can have a multiple number of one or the other. Although Steve Dancy is the main protagonist in my Western novels, he has two (and now three) characters in secondary protagonist roles. Multiple bad guys or gals are also not uncommon. 

After these main characters, the entire story is usually populated with all sorts of supporting and bit players. What if we were to whittle this down to the bare essentials? Could a story be told in a world populated by only one protagonist relentlessly pursued by a single antagonist? Steven Spielberg’s first movie Duel meets this criteria, as well as Tom Hanks’ Cast Away. These are intimate, tense stories. Of course, the Road Runner cartoons fits this minimalist construct. In fact, the Road Runner has no dialogue except for a single word repeated twice.

How in the world can you keep audience interest with these limitations? Watch. You’ll see storytelling reduced to its barest elements. Even if you have a cast of thousands, you can keep the reader’s interest by following the precepts displayed so eloquently by Road Runner cartoons. 

Looking for a Father's Day gift?

The best gift is a vacation … and the least expensive vacation is a book. A novel effortlessly transports the reader to another place and time. With a good book, dad can take a fifteen minute vacation or while away an entire afternoon. Either way, he returns feeling refreshed and more content with life.

Gift books don’t have to be fiction. A respite with a nonfiction book about a special interest can also be relaxing. The great thing about books is that there are numerous ones for every interest, hobby, sport, or enthusiasm. If for some reason, your dad can’t get away to fish, golf, or whatever, he can frequently find a few minutes to read about his favorite activity. A good book allows him to indulge himself and possibly pick up a few pointers.

There is another reason I like to give books as gifts: I can write something personal on the flyleaf that won’t get thrown out like an old greeting card.

The most important thing is to remind your father that you love him. The perfect book is far more personal than most gifts because it’s aimed directly at what you father enjoys. Put some serious thought into the right book to show you really tried to please him.

Here are a couple previous blog postings about Father’s Day.

Father's Day Tribute
What to give for Father's Day?

P.S. It's Saturday. Forgot to shop for a Father's Day gift? It's not too late. Support your local independent boookstore and get dad something he'll really enjoy.

People Love That Story

Kurt Vonnegut

I'm collecting writing tips from famous author's. You can read them here. In this post, I'm adding Kurt Vonnegut’s writing tips. Good advice from an expert storyteller. 

Although I posted it before, I also wanted to share his amusing description of story forms. Behind the entertaining presentation, Kurt presents some solid analysis of the art of storytelling. So if you want to hear it from the horses mouth, watch the video below. 

Here are Kurt Vonnegut’s "8 Tips on How to Write a Great Story."

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

FX’s Justified Lives on …

My favorite television program is Justified.  I don’t lament its demise because I watch TV programs on Netflix or Amazon Prime. I don’t need to be first on my block with an Apple watch, I don’t care about the Kardashians, and I never banter with co-workers. I’m retired and way past the age of needing to be hip, cool, with it, or whatever. (Thank goodness I write historical novels.)

Being out of fashion is liberating. I can wear clothes without an emblazoned logo, drive a 2000 model car, shun Instagram, and watch my favorite television shows whenever and however I want. My way is after the season’s over. I can binge-watch or spread them out, and I’m not even bothered with a need to fast-forward through commercials. Life is grand without a remote in hand.

All of this is to note that I’m in the middle of season 5.  So please, no spoilers.

Justified, starring Timothy Olyphant, Walton Goggins, and a host of other fine actors, is a character-driven modern day western based on a short story by Elmore Leonard. I believe bad guys and gals make heroes heroic, and Justified has a bevy of really bad characters. Our hero has sidekicks of course, but basically, it’s Deputy Marshal Raylan Givens against this cast of misfits, hoodlums, and felonious masterminds. Good actors portraying interesting characters in a tightly written drama presented with masterful storytelling. Who could ask for more?

If you haven’t watched Justified, you should. Here are a few links to articles about the program. The first consolidates all the professional reviews of the final episode. I glanced at it, but quickly closed my browser window before I happened upon a spoiler.

Episode Review: Justified Series Finale by Jason Dietz at Metacritic

Trigger-Happy by Emily Nussbaum in The New Yorker

What ‘Justified’ Reveals About Manhood by Rachel Lu at The Federalist

What ‘Justified’ Really Says About Modern Manhood And Westerns by John Daniel Davidson at The Federalist

The Literary Genius Of ‘Justified’ by John Daniel Davidson at The Federalist

John Daniel Davidson wrote some lines that seem apropos to Justified and westerns in general.

“an extended meditation on grand themes: the price of sin and violence, the ties of blood and kin, the difference between justice and vengeance.”

“the western is at heart about the tension between civilization and barbarism—and the interplay between the two.”

“Ford’s films, like the Greek epics from which they’re drawn, portray civilization as a fragile thing, always under threat and always in need of protection—a task that often falls to those willing to step outside of civilization and into a state of nature. Hence, heroes like Ethan.”