The PIXAR Rules

How the giant studio shapes its stories

A few years ago, PIXAR’s storyboard artist Emma Coats tweeted a series of tips and tricks she learned about storytelling while working at the animation studio. These tweets have been compiled and shared A LOT since she first put them out to the world.

Given the outstanding reception her sage advice had around the world, I think we can safely say they are all well worth exploring. In this post, I want to go over them to see what delicious nuggets of wisdom we can find.

Let’s do it.

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

A huge part of empathy is seeing others make efforts to achieve their goals. This is the core of the second act.

Objective + Challenges = Drama.

If the main character obtains his objective without effort or struggles it cheapens the story. Why are we seeing this? What did a learn?

No trying = No drama.

#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.

As a writer, you always have to keep the audience in mind. They are the ultimate judge of the story because, at the end of the day, the tale is for them.

You have to write about things that interest you to keep that flaming passion within burning and fueling the story, but never forget you are doing all of this for someone else to have fun!

#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.

SO. TRUE.

Some writers set their themes and central ideas down in stone before they start to write, but I’ve found that it’s beneficial to have a general direction of where to aim at, but you have to leave some leeway for improvisation and unexpected moments that may arise. It is at the end of your first draft when you first start to uncover what your story is really about.

The rewrite makes you go back and reframe everything with that theme or central idea in mind to make the theme “pop.”

#4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

When I first started film school we used a very similar prompt to get stories going.

Character introduction -> Call to adventure -> Reaction -> Action -> Conclusion.

It works wonders to create the skeleton of a story!

#5: Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.” — William Faulkner.

Screenwriting is the art of efficiency; you only have so much time and space. Make the most of it.

#6: What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?

You have to be a sadist with your main character!

It is through challenges and difficulty his true colors will emerge. It is pain what makes the character grow. Sort of like going to the gym, you have to put those muscles to the test!

Make your characters fail, make them suffer, and then make them grown.

#7: Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.

I feel like the ending of a story is the answer to a question posted at the beginning. If you know the answer to your question, you have a direction to aim at during the 2nd Act.

It’s way easier to walk the path if you know where you are going!

#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.

There are two lessons here:

A) Finish what you start! You can’t improve it if you don’t finish the story.

B) Let it go after it’s done. You can’t stay on one story forever, take what you learned from it and apply it to a new one.

#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.

The Sherlock Holmes approach!

“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

Taking out the paths your story won’t go down to will leave you with the only option it can — Then follow it.

#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.

From unconscious to conscious.

Jung said that we are puppets of forces we don’t understand, most of them hide in our unconscious. By recognizing what you like in a story you will bring that forth to your consciousness — Then you can use it in your stories.

#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.

The world of ideas is perfect, but it’s also not our world.

The slow download from the world of ideas to ours usually corrupts the information we get, but once in our world, we can begin to work on it properly.

You can’t edit something that’s not here!

#12: Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th — get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.

If you came up with it quickly, so did the audience (probably). Surprising yourself is almost a guaranteed way of surprising the movie-goers.

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” — Robert Frost.

#13: Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.

Characters are usually vehicles for ideas, which they test and improve through the story. A passive character is a boring idea, which equals a boring story.

“meh.” is the enemy.

#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.

Writing a screenplay takes a long time, the fire that lights up inside you and makes you want to write its what’s going to keep you going through the difficult and arduous parts.

If you don’t really care, If there’s no fire burning, you’ll drop it once it gets hard. Let your passion light the way through the shadows of uncertainty that come with crafting a story.

#15: If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.

I love when some unlikely situation happens in a film and the characters point it out. I feel at peace with the story.

After the unlikely event has been acknowledged by the characters, the audience can keep going along with the film. If it is not acknowledged the “that’s impossible!” idea will accompany him the rest of the story.

“If, reader, you are slow now to believe what I shall tell, that is no cause for wonder, for I who saw it hardly can accept it.” — Dante.

#16: What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.

And make it personal for them!

Not every movie has to be about the end of the world. Losing a friend, finding love, or getting back a valuable item can be as intense as the apocalypse if it feels like that to your main character.

#17: No work t is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on — it’ll come back around to be useful later.

Sometimes you need to try different things to get to where you wanted your story to go. You didn’t lose time, work, or effort going down all those erroneous paths, they were the ones that lead your story to where it is now.

#18: You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.

Related to #8.

Writing is not like grinding down a rock to the desired shape, it’s more like the scientific method. Different experiments yield different results, one of those tests will lead you the story you are looking for.

Test different ideas. See how they affect your story.

#19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.

Deus Ex Machina [ ]
Diabolus Ex Machina [ X ]

#20: Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?

This exercise will make you realize what makes a story work for you and what doesn’t. Structure and plotting are a big part of screenwriting, being aware of what structural changes do to your story will give more control over them.

“It’s hard to write a good play because it’s hard to structure a plot.” — David Mamet.

#21: You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘coolha’. What would make YOU act that way?

This idea is often misunderstood, people take that “write what you know” means write about your life. But what you know is so much more than what you have lived thru, there’s so much information out there to be explored and fed into your story-making machine (your head).

What you know can also be emotionally true, if not factually true. For example, You might be able to write a story about being an outcast in a civilization in mars because you once were an outcast while traveling through Europe.

#22: What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.

This is way screenwriting gurus like Robert McKee give such importance to Loglines.

If you can’t make it work in 50 words, you won’t be able to make it work in 90 pages.

And that was the last one!

I hope going over ‘The PIXAR rules’ helped you somehow, I sure know it helped me. Sometimes going over these lists can clear up storms brewing over your story. Dispel them.

Happy writing!