Pixar’s Screenwriting Tips

Nicholas C. Rossis

In my last post, I discussed how to create memorable characters the Pixar way. This one has some more writing tips from No Film School. This one includes several tweets from Director and Pixar storyboard artist Emma Coats (@lawnrocket). I hope you find them useful!

Character tips

• Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.
• You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.
• What is your character good at; comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
• Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.
• If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations. What would make YOU act that way?
• What are the stakes? Give us a…

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Change Matters: How to Write Stories that Grip Readers & Don’t Let Go – Written By Kristen Lamb

Writer's Treasure Chest

Thank you so much, Kristen Lamb, for another educational blog post on how to write stories properly and keep the reader interested. We all appreciate your hard work!

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Change is one of those concepts that gets a mixed reaction. Depending on personality and/or age group, change could be welcomed…or greeted with a metaphorical shotgun at the metaphorical door. While change is necessary for all living things to grow and thrive, plants have proven far more open to this notion than people.

I’m betting it’s because plants don’t overthink everything…unless they’re orchids which are high-maintenance and die while writing bad haiku (if they had hands and pen and paper).

Existential plants have a far tougher time, unlike weeds. Weeds just roll with anything that comes their way, and that’s why we can pour concrete over them and it’s no big deal. They simply mumble to the nearby crabgrass, “Hold my beer…

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Writing Rules vs. Writing Fashion: Should Writers Follow Fashion Trends? – Written by Anne R. Allen

Writer's Treasure Chest

Fashion. It sounds frivolous, but it has serious effects on us all.

Right now, women are getting beard-burn from kissing men who sport the fashionable romantic-hero three-day stubble. And mothers are stifling their disappointment when their golden-haired boys get the fashion-victim shaved-sides hairdo that makes them look like a cross between Kim Jong Un and the Last of the Mohicans.

And have pity on the people over 40 who are hunched over their computers trying to decipher text from the latest fashion in web design: a tiny, palest-gray font on a white background.

Alas, fashion favors the young.

Writing fashion is hard on us too. Fashion dictates a good deal of what gets published these days, and it’s constantly changing. Write like Thackery, Kipling, or Walter Scott and you’re unlikely to find a publisher or an audience. That’s because writing fashions have radically changed in the last two hundred years…

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Surprisingly Progressive Pirates

05 Friday Mar 2021
Posted by Nicholas C. Rossis in Fun Historical Facts

As a kid, when I thought of pirates I dreamed of absolute freedom with plenty of swashbuckling.

When I grew up, I realized that pirates were bloodthirsty savages who deserved to be strung for their unforgivable crimes against countless civilians. So terrible was their presence in the Mediterranean that until last century parents would leave inland plots to their sons and coastal ones to their daughters, as the latter had practically no value (with the advent of tourism, of course, these girls’ descendants became rich).

So, I was surprised to discover today that, for a brief moment in history between the 17th-18th century, a golden age of piracy burst into life against all odds and burned bright for a century.

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