15 ms·

The Rules of Storytelling According to Pixar

230 points by TravisLS 14y ago

fuzzythinker 14y ago
The list applies to developers too. I like these in particular: #5: Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You'll feel like you're losing valuable stuff but it sets you free. (substitute characters for features) #7: Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front. (when starting a new project, there's so many different directions/visions) #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.
- astrodust 14y ago
  There's some peculiar similarities between writing an application and writing a novel. This is where most start-ups stumble: "What's the essence of your application? Most economical way to explain it? If you know that, you can build out from there."
- kvnn 14y ago
  Yeah, definitely. It applies to making songs as well. It probably applies to any creative, competitive endeavor in which a stranger consumes the end result.
- ma2rten 14y ago
  #12: Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself. "I don't think it's good that Apple is perceived as different. I think it's important that Apple is perceived as much better. If being different is essential for that, then we should be different, but if we could be much better without being different that would be fine with me." -- Steve Jobs at WWDC 1997
  - vacri 14y ago
    Interesting that the marketing slogan for that year was 'think different' rather than 'think much better'...
shrikant 14y ago
For those who aren't fans of the pointlessly JS-heavy page, this is the original source: http://www.pixartouchbook.com/blog/2011/5/15/pixar-story-rules-one-version.html http://www.pixartouchbook.com/blog/2011/5/15/pixar-story-rul... io9 hasn't added much else to the original list.
- Figs 14y ago
  Thank you; the io9 website is always completely broken for me for some reason -- any time someone links to it, all I get is their logo (or sometimes only part of it...) and a broken purple or white page with no text. I've tried turning off all my extensions (adblock, flashblock, etc) but it is still totally broken. This is with the latest Firefox on Windows, in case anyone at their site reads this and cares to try to fix it. Here's a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/ApFCi.png http://i.imgur.com/ApFCi.png
  - eggdude 14y ago
    Looks similar to what I get with NoScript turned on.
  - alter8 14y ago
    I have a Google Cache bookmarklet ready for this. Why do Gawker pages look right in Google Cache? Are they cheating?
kvnn 14y ago
I'm really happy that this is on the front page. This sort of tangential wisdom makes me a better builder than many acute technical posts do.
wallflower 14y ago
If you liked this, I highly recommend reading Stephen King's "On Writing" http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10569.On_Writing http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10569.On_Writing
pjg 14y ago
Substitute the word "character" with "product" and all these rules seem to have remarkable likeness to designing a successful product/building a successful startup
TrevorJ 14y ago
I've had the pleasure of hearing various people from Pixar speak. What impresses me most is the attitude of humility and the love of learning the craft the seem to have. I'm pretty amazed they have managed to maintain that after so many hit movies, the temptation to sit back and feel like you've cracked the enigma of storytelling and have it all figured out must be huge.
haberman 14y ago
> Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating. Ugh. Please, no. I have no training as a fiction writer but as an audience member I hate this. Nothing is more annoying than tension that comes from a totally implausible sequence of events.
- runevault 14y ago
  Coincidence and implausibility are not necessarily the same thing. Good writing requires you to still make it BELIEVABLE but that doesn't mean it can't have an element of "Talk about bad luck"
  - jackalope 14y ago
    Agreed. Coincidences do have an effect and are worth exploring when writing about the human condition, regardless of the outcome. I get the feeling the author was trying to offer a simple example of deus ex machina, which can be enjoyable, but is cheating, nonetheless.
- vacri 14y ago
  It's not that bad - coincidences get people into trouble all the time. The problem in resolving a story with a coincidence is that it robs the main characters of their struggle. It happens in real life, but it's not compelling fiction. "I lost my job due to things beyond my control, and subsequently lost my house, but three months later I won the lottery. The end." is a great real life story, but it sucks as fiction.
mdonahoe 14y ago
"#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." I use a similar technique when brainstorming, after all the obvious good ideas are exhausted. Think of the worst possible way to solve a problem, and then look nearby for reasonable solutions.
JumpCrisscross 14y ago
>#19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating. With a little bit of retrospection, this seems to be one of the most powerful factors separating the films I've liked from those I haven't. It's interesting to see how storytelling is like modelling - build a hypothetical universe with hypothetical characters and see what plot(s) emerge(s). If it's unsatisfactory, don't change the plot directly, but instead manipulate the characters until the black box spits out something interesting. Reflecting on my recent viewing of Snow White and the Huntsman, it makes sense why Charlize Theron's character managed to get so much more developed than the others' - the character-centric story development process naturally produces a wide distribution of character depths.
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  Related is screenwriter Terry Rossio's concept of "Impressive Failure". Essentially the idea is that characters are defined by the quality of their failures. http://www.wordplayer.com/columns/wp08.Impressive.Failure.html http://www.wordplayer.com/columns/wp08.Impressive.Failure.ht...
- cheatercheater 14y ago
  A coincidence is just something which happened without a lead-on. An outcome surprising, therefore perceived as improbable (perception bias at play here). Anything that happens in time has an outcome and things that follow it in logical order. However, we think differently if we flip the time axis, and look at the sequence of events leading onto a final event, rather than if we look at the sequence of events started by a seminal event. The simple way to overcome this? Put your coincidence in. Then, start going back in time, dropping smaller and smaller clues and building premise for the "coincidence" to happen. Finally, it's not a coincidence any more. The difference between "coincidence" and "culmination" is fairly menial work. I am surprised more authors don't do this, and sometimes wonder if they don't include a build-up just to be intentionally cheesy. If you want to have fun experimenting with the reversal of time in logical reasoning, please try a game I have invented, called Neutrino. You can find a description at http://cheater.posterous.com/neutrino http://cheater.posterous.com/neutrino (let me know if there are any problems). I have come up with it autumn last year and wrote a blog post about it, but forgot to upload it (or maybe there was some more work to do that I forgot about completely...) - you get an upvote for several reasons, one of them is that you reminded me that I should put it up! Thanks!
akg 14y ago
There seems to be a pretty common message for many of the rules here that encourage trial-and-error and re-doing things. I think that is just brilliant advice for innovation in general not just story writing. Not being afraid to fail and trying things again and again truly leads to amazing results.
Vadoff 14y ago
Blizzard's writing staff would do well to brush up on these rules... Diablo 3's and SC2's writing was absolutely terrible. Oh, George Lucas too.
- Jare 14y ago
  George Lucas would probably read them like this: #1: You admire a character for trying to be funny more than for actually being interesting. #2: You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what got you an actual audience. 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 it so Greedo shoots first. etc...
- ralfd 14y ago
  Oh, Yes! They also really like corrupting the hot chick by ultimate evil (Kerrigan/Leah) only to make a salvation story in the expansion.
batista 14y ago
I, for one, find Pixar's storytelling extremely naive, paint-by-numbers kind of affair. Like past Disney without the genius (e.g Fantasia, the dark forest scene in Snow White, etc) but with more puns thrown in. Or maybe "animated ho-hum Spielberg" is more apt. Could be OK to take your kid to, but IMHO even kids (or especially kids) deserve better. And not to be accused that I speak without offering an alternative, I think that something like "A nightmare before Christmas" is light years ahead of Pixar's work, in storytelling, artistic vision, and even visually (and I'm not saying that because of its "dark mood". Light stories could also be told in a more artistic way than Pixar's).
- patrickgzill 14y ago
  Can you give some examples? Would improve your argument.
  - icebraining 14y ago
    I'm not batista, but, he did give examples of better stuff. What do you mean as examples?
    - planetguy 14y ago
      It's not much of a critique to say that one thing is bad and another one is better. Batista didn't really give any explanation for why he thinks Pixar films are bad, which when you're talking about some of the world's highest approval-rating films, tends to be a bit content-free. A detailed critique would be interesting; simply to say they're "naive" is... I dunno, naïve.
    - vacri 14y ago
      He didn't cover why they were better, just stated that they were.
- pestaa 14y ago
  Your point of view is kind of surprising. I couldn't stop watching Wall-E for example even for the 10th time, because I found it so unique and compelling. Even if it was painted by numbers, there were lots of numbers and not just integers. Not to say the plot was not predictable, if that is your primary issue.
cheatercheater 14y ago
I have been struggling to produce some form of artistic, or even creative output almost all my life, in different media and contexts, and I have had to learn #14 on my own. Trying hard, and I have thought about this on many occasions, I could not come up with a more essential and fundamental prerequisite to making art. There is so much "art" out there that simply does not have a story to tell. There are so many struggling artists that do not have a story to tell, and they keep wondering why they don't achieve success of any measure. I'm not going to say that realizing this made me insanely successful overnight, but it has given me a direction and hope of ever actually reaching the point at which I can be satisfied with something I have created. However, I think that it is more important than just as a way to make good art. The quote originally reads: "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." I would say that this generalizes to: What is the value of what you're doing? This is crucial. A lot of people do things without value, or do not focus on the value and let themselves become sidetracked by the whole ritual of their form. What I mean by "the ritual of their form" is the often sizeable set of gimmicks you feel forced to tack onto whatever you are making. For example, every website now "needs" Oauth and social network support and other junk, which is not crucial, but it's something everyone feels they need to have. This sort of ritualistic dance happens in every form of output, be it when they create a computer program, a business (we need to be agile! be green! support the community!), a new philosophy, a new movie, a new bicycle, a new mathematics theorem, a new noodle recipe. The generalized form does lose its potency, though. Applied literally to music, you'd ask: What is the value of the music you are creating? I think asking What is the story your music tells? is much more accurate. I guess I am trying to say that the word value can be interpreted in different ways, and many of them are not going to get you very far from what you are doing already. For example, when thinking of technology, value is application. So I'd ask: What sort of application can this technology bear? If I were going to add anything to Pixar's list, it would be this: !!!! KEEP A SCRAPBOOK, ASSOCIATE ENTRIES TO THE VALUES (EMOTIONS, THEMES, APPLICATIONS) THEY EVOKE !!!! Yup, all caps, so that you don't scroll past. This was the single thing that boosted my productivity most in the last several years, and it out-classes everything else by very, very far. I currently have two folders under $HOME/Documents, called "creative" and "topics". I first started "topics" where I'd save pages visited, notes, documents, and so on in a directory tree, so for example I have topics/computers/haskell/refactoring/. and topics/electronics/tubes/. and topics/health/bodybuilding/training-plan/. and so on. Later I started noticing that I also visit a lot of creative stuff that I want to keep a track on, which I cannot sort into this rigid system I built under "topics" because it evoked emotions, rather than ideas of practical applications. I guess that this is my Starship & the Canoe (and if you haven't read the book, at least read a summary). The "creative" system came into place a bit after I started trawling Youtube for music I like, and decided to sort it according to emotion. I now have 59 private playlists, with entries like "feeling of optimism and inner peace", "peril / 70s car chase", "hanging at the peak", "hyped", and "pleasant summer sun", many of those have more than 20 entries. Some of the names won't make much of a sense to anyone but me. My "creative" directory contains entries like "beauty", "inspirational", "introversion", "poverty", "trippy", and so on. If there was only one thing they were to teach me during primary and high school, I wish it was how to do this. Sadly, they didn't. As many people, I can't really pinpoint one skill I use every day that school has taught me.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
RockofStrength 14y ago
A very interesting theory of storytelling is the Dramatica theory of story. http://storymind.com/dramatica/ http://storymind.com/dramatica/ I believe the movie Contact (any many others) were written with the Dramatica template. This area was how I was introduced to the site (I was investigating Robert Mckee because of seeing the movie "Synecdoche New York"): http://www.dramatica.com/theory/articles/index.htm http://www.dramatica.com/theory/articles/index.htm
- egypturnash 14y ago
  I'm about thirty pages into the Dramatica PDF and am finding it very interesting in how it specifically codifies some things I've observed about stories while working on my comics. This promises to be an interesting read, thanks!
loceng 14y ago
Thanks for posting this. This now gives me the framework to start creating a plot around some ideas I've had floating around and evolving for quite some time.
sreyaNotfilc 14y ago
"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." This is the theme of my project. Especially the past 2 years. Except I do put it on paper, but actually building the thing always takes a second hand because I keep waiting for the "perfect" solution. I've finally gave up on that idea, because 1) i don't have the resources to build the perfect idea 2) it takes too long to wait for something to happen in your head I've recently adopt a motto "hackFast". This means to know what you want to get done and just do it. And not just lazily open up your IDE and selective fix or create things. I mean, to open the IDE and just dominate the code. There's a balance that I haven't achieved yet. There are times when you do need to think of the perfect solution, but until then get the prototype done. You're mind will wrap around the logic and it will eventually fix itself. #11 and #17 goes hand and hand. It all go down to doing it. ..I've also been recently reading "Getting Things Done".

230 points by TravisLS 14y ago

The list applies to developers too. I like these in particular: #5: Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You'll feel like you're losing valuable stuff but it sets you free. (substitute characters for features) #7: Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front. (when starting a new project, there's so many different directions/visions) #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.

astrodust 14y ago
There's some peculiar similarities between writing an application and writing a novel. This is where most start-ups stumble: "What's the essence of your application? Most economical way to explain it? If you know that, you can build out from there."
kvnn 14y ago
Yeah, definitely. It applies to making songs as well. It probably applies to any creative, competitive endeavor in which a stranger consumes the end result.
ma2rten 14y ago
#12: Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself. "I don't think it's good that Apple is perceived as different. I think it's important that Apple is perceived as much better. If being different is essential for that, then we should be different, but if we could be much better without being different that would be fine with me." -- Steve Jobs at WWDC 1997
- vacri 14y ago
  Interesting that the marketing slogan for that year was 'think different' rather than 'think much better'...

shrikant 14y ago

For those who aren't fans of the pointlessly JS-heavy page, this is the original source: http://www.pixartouchbook.com/blog/2011/5/15/pixar-story-rules-one-version.html http://www.pixartouchbook.com/blog/2011/5/15/pixar-story-rul... io9 hasn't added much else to the original list.

Figs 14y ago
Thank you; the io9 website is always completely broken for me for some reason -- any time someone links to it, all I get is their logo (or sometimes only part of it...) and a broken purple or white page with no text. I've tried turning off all my extensions (adblock, flashblock, etc) but it is still totally broken. This is with the latest Firefox on Windows, in case anyone at their site reads this and cares to try to fix it. Here's a screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/ApFCi.png http://i.imgur.com/ApFCi.png
- eggdude 14y ago
  Looks similar to what I get with NoScript turned on.
- alter8 14y ago
  I have a Google Cache bookmarklet ready for this. Why do Gawker pages look right in Google Cache? Are they cheating?

kvnn 14y ago

I'm really happy that this is on the front page. This sort of tangential wisdom makes me a better builder than many acute technical posts do.

wallflower 14y ago

If you liked this, I highly recommend reading Stephen King's "On Writing" http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10569.On_Writing http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10569.On_Writing

pjg 14y ago

Substitute the word "character" with "product" and all these rules seem to have remarkable likeness to designing a successful product/building a successful startup

TrevorJ 14y ago

I've had the pleasure of hearing various people from Pixar speak. What impresses me most is the attitude of humility and the love of learning the craft the seem to have. I'm pretty amazed they have managed to maintain that after so many hit movies, the temptation to sit back and feel like you've cracked the enigma of storytelling and have it all figured out must be huge.

haberman 14y ago

> Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating. Ugh. Please, no. I have no training as a fiction writer but as an audience member I hate this. Nothing is more annoying than tension that comes from a totally implausible sequence of events.

runevault 14y ago
Coincidence and implausibility are not necessarily the same thing. Good writing requires you to still make it BELIEVABLE but that doesn't mean it can't have an element of "Talk about bad luck"
- jackalope 14y ago
  Agreed. Coincidences do have an effect and are worth exploring when writing about the human condition, regardless of the outcome. I get the feeling the author was trying to offer a simple example of deus ex machina, which can be enjoyable, but is cheating, nonetheless.
vacri 14y ago
It's not that bad - coincidences get people into trouble all the time. The problem in resolving a story with a coincidence is that it robs the main characters of their struggle. It happens in real life, but it's not compelling fiction. "I lost my job due to things beyond my control, and subsequently lost my house, but three months later I won the lottery. The end." is a great real life story, but it sucks as fiction.

mdonahoe 14y ago

"#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." I use a similar technique when brainstorming, after all the obvious good ideas are exhausted. Think of the worst possible way to solve a problem, and then look nearby for reasonable solutions.

JumpCrisscross 14y ago

>#19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating. With a little bit of retrospection, this seems to be one of the most powerful factors separating the films I've liked from those I haven't. It's interesting to see how storytelling is like modelling - build a hypothetical universe with hypothetical characters and see what plot(s) emerge(s). If it's unsatisfactory, don't change the plot directly, but instead manipulate the characters until the black box spits out something interesting. Reflecting on my recent viewing of Snow White and the Huntsman, it makes sense why Charlize Theron's character managed to get so much more developed than the others' - the character-centric story development process naturally produces a wide distribution of character depths.

waterlesscloud 14y ago
Related is screenwriter Terry Rossio's concept of "Impressive Failure". Essentially the idea is that characters are defined by the quality of their failures. http://www.wordplayer.com/columns/wp08.Impressive.Failure.html http://www.wordplayer.com/columns/wp08.Impressive.Failure.ht...
cheatercheater 14y ago
A coincidence is just something which happened without a lead-on. An outcome surprising, therefore perceived as improbable (perception bias at play here). Anything that happens in time has an outcome and things that follow it in logical order. However, we think differently if we flip the time axis, and look at the sequence of events leading onto a final event, rather than if we look at the sequence of events started by a seminal event. The simple way to overcome this? Put your coincidence in. Then, start going back in time, dropping smaller and smaller clues and building premise for the "coincidence" to happen. Finally, it's not a coincidence any more. The difference between "coincidence" and "culmination" is fairly menial work. I am surprised more authors don't do this, and sometimes wonder if they don't include a build-up just to be intentionally cheesy. If you want to have fun experimenting with the reversal of time in logical reasoning, please try a game I have invented, called Neutrino. You can find a description at http://cheater.posterous.com/neutrino http://cheater.posterous.com/neutrino (let me know if there are any problems). I have come up with it autumn last year and wrote a blog post about it, but forgot to upload it (or maybe there was some more work to do that I forgot about completely...) - you get an upvote for several reasons, one of them is that you reminded me that I should put it up! Thanks!

akg 14y ago

There seems to be a pretty common message for many of the rules here that encourage trial-and-error and re-doing things. I think that is just brilliant advice for innovation in general not just story writing. Not being afraid to fail and trying things again and again truly leads to amazing results.

Vadoff 14y ago

Blizzard's writing staff would do well to brush up on these rules... Diablo 3's and SC2's writing was absolutely terrible. Oh, George Lucas too.

Jare 14y ago
George Lucas would probably read them like this: #1: You admire a character for trying to be funny more than for actually being interesting. #2: You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what got you an actual audience. 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 it so Greedo shoots first. etc...
ralfd 14y ago
Oh, Yes! They also really like corrupting the hot chick by ultimate evil (Kerrigan/Leah) only to make a salvation story in the expansion.

batista 14y ago

I, for one, find Pixar's storytelling extremely naive, paint-by-numbers kind of affair. Like past Disney without the genius (e.g Fantasia, the dark forest scene in Snow White, etc) but with more puns thrown in. Or maybe "animated ho-hum Spielberg" is more apt. Could be OK to take your kid to, but IMHO even kids (or especially kids) deserve better. And not to be accused that I speak without offering an alternative, I think that something like "A nightmare before Christmas" is light years ahead of Pixar's work, in storytelling, artistic vision, and even visually (and I'm not saying that because of its "dark mood". Light stories could also be told in a more artistic way than Pixar's).

patrickgzill 14y ago
Can you give some examples? Would improve your argument.
- icebraining 14y ago
  I'm not batista, but, he did give examples of better stuff. What do you mean as examples?
  - planetguy 14y ago
    It's not much of a critique to say that one thing is bad and another one is better. Batista didn't really give any explanation for why he thinks Pixar films are bad, which when you're talking about some of the world's highest approval-rating films, tends to be a bit content-free. A detailed critique would be interesting; simply to say they're "naive" is... I dunno, naïve.
  - vacri 14y ago
    He didn't cover why they were better, just stated that they were.
pestaa 14y ago
Your point of view is kind of surprising. I couldn't stop watching Wall-E for example even for the 10th time, because I found it so unique and compelling. Even if it was painted by numbers, there were lots of numbers and not just integers. Not to say the plot was not predictable, if that is your primary issue.

cheatercheater 14y ago

I have been struggling to produce some form of artistic, or even creative output almost all my life, in different media and contexts, and I have had to learn #14 on my own. Trying hard, and I have thought about this on many occasions, I could not come up with a more essential and fundamental prerequisite to making art. There is so much "art" out there that simply does not have a story to tell. There are so many struggling artists that do not have a story to tell, and they keep wondering why they don't achieve success of any measure. I'm not going to say that realizing this made me insanely successful overnight, but it has given me a direction and hope of ever actually reaching the point at which I can be satisfied with something I have created. However, I think that it is more important than just as a way to make good art. The quote originally reads: "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." I would say that this generalizes to: What is the value of what you're doing? This is crucial. A lot of people do things without value, or do not focus on the value and let themselves become sidetracked by the whole ritual of their form. What I mean by "the ritual of their form" is the often sizeable set of gimmicks you feel forced to tack onto whatever you are making. For example, every website now "needs" Oauth and social network support and other junk, which is not crucial, but it's something everyone feels they need to have. This sort of ritualistic dance happens in every form of output, be it when they create a computer program, a business (we need to be agile! be green! support the community!), a new philosophy, a new movie, a new bicycle, a new mathematics theorem, a new noodle recipe. The generalized form does lose its potency, though. Applied literally to music, you'd ask: What is the value of the music you are creating? I think asking What is the story your music tells? is much more accurate. I guess I am trying to say that the word value can be interpreted in different ways, and many of them are not going to get you very far from what you are doing already. For example, when thinking of technology, value is application. So I'd ask: What sort of application can this technology bear? If I were going to add anything to Pixar's list, it would be this: !!!! KEEP A SCRAPBOOK, ASSOCIATE ENTRIES TO THE VALUES (EMOTIONS, THEMES, APPLICATIONS) THEY EVOKE !!!! Yup, all caps, so that you don't scroll past. This was the single thing that boosted my productivity most in the last several years, and it out-classes everything else by very, very far. I currently have two folders under $HOME/Documents, called "creative" and "topics". I first started "topics" where I'd save pages visited, notes, documents, and so on in a directory tree, so for example I have topics/computers/haskell/refactoring/. and topics/electronics/tubes/. and topics/health/bodybuilding/training-plan/. and so on. Later I started noticing that I also visit a lot of creative stuff that I want to keep a track on, which I cannot sort into this rigid system I built under "topics" because it evoked emotions, rather than ideas of practical applications. I guess that this is my Starship & the Canoe (and if you haven't read the book, at least read a summary). The "creative" system came into place a bit after I started trawling Youtube for music I like, and decided to sort it according to emotion. I now have 59 private playlists, with entries like "feeling of optimism and inner peace", "peril / 70s car chase", "hanging at the peak", "hyped", and "pleasant summer sun", many of those have more than 20 entries. Some of the names won't make much of a sense to anyone but me. My "creative" directory contains entries like "beauty", "inspirational", "introversion", "poverty", "trippy", and so on. If there was only one thing they were to teach me during primary and high school, I wish it was how to do this. Sadly, they didn't. As many people, I can't really pinpoint one skill I use every day that school has taught me.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

RockofStrength 14y ago

A very interesting theory of storytelling is the Dramatica theory of story. http://storymind.com/dramatica/ http://storymind.com/dramatica/ I believe the movie Contact (any many others) were written with the Dramatica template. This area was how I was introduced to the site (I was investigating Robert Mckee because of seeing the movie "Synecdoche New York"): http://www.dramatica.com/theory/articles/index.htm http://www.dramatica.com/theory/articles/index.htm

egypturnash 14y ago
I'm about thirty pages into the Dramatica PDF and am finding it very interesting in how it specifically codifies some things I've observed about stories while working on my comics. This promises to be an interesting read, thanks!

loceng 14y ago

Thanks for posting this. This now gives me the framework to start creating a plot around some ideas I've had floating around and evolving for quite some time.

sreyaNotfilc 14y ago

"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." This is the theme of my project. Especially the past 2 years. Except I do put it on paper, but actually building the thing always takes a second hand because I keep waiting for the "perfect" solution. I've finally gave up on that idea, because 1) i don't have the resources to build the perfect idea 2) it takes too long to wait for something to happen in your head I've recently adopt a motto "hackFast". This means to know what you want to get done and just do it. And not just lazily open up your IDE and selective fix or create things. I mean, to open the IDE and just dominate the code. There's a balance that I haven't achieved yet. There are times when you do need to think of the perfect solution, but until then get the prototype done. You're mind will wrap around the logic and it will eventually fix itself. #11 and #17 goes hand and hand. It all go down to doing it. ..I've also been recently reading "Getting Things Done".