PIXAR’S 22 RULES OF STORY (RULE #5)

RULE #5: Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free. 
Or, more simply:  
Rule 5. Simplify. 
This is the piece of advice that is hardest for most storytellers to hear, because simplifying always means cutting good stuff as well as bad. 
That last sentence is a rephrasing of writers’ “kill your darlings” wisdom that dates back to before Faulkner said it (at least to Arthur Quiller-Couch).  
But the idea that you have to lose scenes, characters, and ideas that are actually good in order to cut away clutter so the audience can clearly see the core ideas in your story goes back long before that.  
And sometimes you do indeed have to cut material you know is awesome in order to do what’s right for the story.  
Great scenes that play well in isolation but don’t add new information, blow the pacing, or otherwise just add dead weight have to go.  
Characters that are redundant need to be combined. If two characters interact with and reflect the personality of your protagonist in similar ways, they ought to be the same character.  
Screen stories in particular need to be concise. Each new scene and every character should give the audience new information and different perspectives. Redundancies rarely work in screenwriting, and filler may fix pacing issues but the audience will notice that not much is really going on in those scenes and lose interest (even if each individual scene is action-packed).  
So unless the scene is moving the story forward, it is a candidate for removal. (Note that I said the story, not just the plot. Emotional scenes that “stall” the plot can
be crucial for certain kinds of stories with a certain kind of pacing.) 
This can, of course, be taken too far. Few stories need to be one character delivering a monologue in an empty room. That’s too simple.  

PIXAR’S 22 RULES OF STORY (RULE #4)

RULE #4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___. 
This keen little template is called “the story spine”. It comes from the world of improv theater, and was created by Kenn Adams, not Pixar. 
Pixar does offer improv classes and has a standing improv theater group that performs weekly, so many employees have been exposed to the story spine as a creative exercise.  
It’s a fun, useful exercise for improv theater. And a great way to “riff on” structural ideas at a very high level since it is a simplified statement of an idea that many other systems and theories also elucidate: that a story is a change from an old status quo to a new one, “old world” to “new world”, through action and conflict. 
You can find similar but more expansive ideas along the same line in the writings of Syd Field, Robert McKee, Blake Snyder, Chris Vogler, John Truby, Lew Hunter, etc.  
Each of their models is partitioned and phrased differently, and some are very formally rigorous while others are more flexible, but they are all saying the same basic thing:  
A story has a setup, change through conflict, and resolution.

PIXAR’S 22 RULES OF STORY (RULE #3)

RULE #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. 
I wholeheartedly agree that writers should write all the way to the end and then rewrite. In fact, I’d recommend doing that more than once. As the common aphorism “all writing is rewriting” points out, that’s the only way to really find your story.  
But as for not seeing what the story is actually about (its theme) until you’re at the end of it — I take the opposite tack. I don’t think you should even start the story until you know what the end is, therefore what it’s about.  
“What it’s about” will likely change during the course of writing a draft, but it’s too common to meander and write yourself into corners when trying to get to an unspecified ending.  
So if you don’t know how your story ends when you start writing, be prepared to pay a lot extra to get there.  

PIXAR’S 22 RULES OF STORY (RULE #2)

RULE #2: Keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be very different. 
This may seem like strange advice at first blush. If something is interesting to you as an audience, shouldn’t it also be fun to write?  
Seriously; I’m not being flip. Storytellers should enjoy writing things that they enjoy reading and viewing.  
If that’s not enjoyable to you, maybe storyteller is the wrong calling for you. Every story needs to flow from a place of joy, passion, love, or yearning within the storyteller, or it certainly will not be fun to write, or to read.  
The premise of the statement really stems from the common notion that writers in particular naturally enjoy writing internal monologue, evocatively meandering descriptions, abstraction, and other things that “shouldn’t” be in a screenplay.  

THOUGHTS ABOUT SOME ESSENTIALS OF SCREENWRITING

TELLING A STORY:
A screenplay is a way of telling a story – one way (a point that needs to be stressed in today’s screenplay saturated culture), not the best, just the one that has currently caught the public fancy, nor a particularly easy, or even natural way of telling a story, in fact, a rather hard one, which again has nothing to do with whether it's a particularly good way of telling a story. I’ll explain what I mean. If I said, Tell me a story of what happened to you yesterday, you could, without too much creative stress, come up with at least an acceptable tale of some incident. But if I said, Tell me a joke, not a funny incident, but an actual joke with a set-up and punch-line, that you have invented, you would have a much greater problem.

PIXAR’S 22 RULES OF STORY (RULE #1)

Introduction:
In 2011 a former Pixar colleague, Emma Coats, Tweeted a series of storytelling aphorisms that were then compiled into a list and circulated as “Pixar’s 22 Rules Of Storytelling”.  
She clearly stated in her compilation blog post that the Tweets were “a mix of things learned from directors & coworkers at Pixar, listening to writers & directors talk about their craft, and via trial and error in the making of my own films.”  
We all learn from each other at Pixar, and it’s the most amazing “film school” you could possibly have. Everybody at the company is constantly striving to learn new things, and push the envelope in their own core areas of expertise.  

How to Format a Script the Absolute Correct Way.

 
Figuring out how to format a script correctly can stall many writers before they ever type their first FADE IN: (or, in most cases, never type FADE IN: - this element is no longer commonly used.) 
To write this article, we spoke with screenwriters, teachers, professional readers, software companies, and screenwriting festival judges. We read some excellent books such as The Screenwriter’s Bible, Elements of Style for Screenwriters, and The Cole and Haag series. Here’s the secret to a properly formatted script: There is no 100% absolutely correct way to format a script!