story time

do you have a lovely weekend ahead of you? i hope so. this is our first full weekend home in what seems like eternity, so we are taking it pretty easy and just getting some business taken care of. business that hopefully involves buying a grill because summer is here big time and we want to live it up! there is also a food truck festival on the agenda for tonight, and hopefully some bike rides in our near future as well.

but, before all that, i wanted to share this, it being a list of story-telling rules from pixar. pretty cool, right? i can totally see how they come up with so many good stories at pixar using these tricks. and, i thought there were some pretty good tips in there for courageously building the stories of our own lives as well. a few favorites:

#1: you admire a character more for trying than for their successes

#12: discount the first thing that comes to your mind. and the second, and the third and the fourth and the fifth. 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.

#17: no work is ever wasted. if it's not working, let go and move on. it'll come back around to being useful later.

all i have to say to all of that is: amen.