baby girl i could watch you sprawl liquidly down stairs in the sun all day
Pixars 22 Rules of Story Telling
9 is worth the price of admission, holy crap.
This is genius. So many great writing tips!
And this is why Pixar is a master in their field.
Why do I feel so weird reblogging this… this is the weekend dammit! Anyway, great advice.
Pixar you have no idea how much this actually helps me.
These are all fantastic pieces of advice.
For reference
For great reference
- Admire characters for attempting more than what their successes have been.
- Keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer
- Trying for theme is important, however you won’t see what the story is about until you’re at the end of the story. Got it? Now rewrite.
- Once upon a time there was ____. Every day, ____. One day, _____. Because of that, _____. Because of that, _____. Until finally, ____.
- Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.
- What is your character good at or comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at him. Challenge him. How does he deal with it?
- Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard. Get yours working up front.
- 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.
- When you’re stuck, make a list of what wouldn’t happen next. More often than not, the material that gets you unstuck appears.
- Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in there is a part of you. Recognize it before you use it.
- Why must you tell this story in particular? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.
- Discount the first thing that comes to mind. And the second, third, fourth, fifth—get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.
- Give your characters opinions. A character being passive or malleable is easy for you as a writer, but it’s poison to your audience.
- What’s the essence of your story? What’s the most economical way of telling it? If you know that, you can build out from there.
- If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty leads credibility to unbelievable situations.
- What are the stakes? Give a reason to root for the character. What happens if he doesn’t succeed? Stack the odds against him.
- No work is ever wasted. And if it’s not working, let go and move on — if it’s useful, it’ll show up again.
- You have to know yourself, and know the difference between doing your best and being fussy. Story is testing, not refining.
- Coincidences that get characters into trouble are great. Coincidences that get them out of it is cheating.
- Excercise. Take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How would you rearrange them into what you DO like?
- Identify with your situation/characters. Don’t write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?
- Putting it on paper only allows you to start fixing it. If a perfect idea stays in your head, you’ll never share it with anyone.
Fantasy books written by women are often assumed to be young adult, even when those books are written for adults, marketed to adults, and published by adult SFF imprints. And this happens even more frequently to women of color.
This topic’s an ongoing conversation on book Twitter, and I thought it might be worth sharing with Tumblr. And by “ongoing,” I mean that people have been talking about this for years. Last year, there was a big blow up when the author R.F. Kuang said publicly that her book The Poppy War isn’t young adult and that she wished people would stop calling it such. If you’ve read The Poppy War, then you’ll know it’s grimdark fantasy along lines of Game of Thrones… and yet people constantly refer to The Poppy War as young adult – which is one of its popular shelves on Goodreads. To be fair, more people have shelved it as “adult,” but why is anyone shelving it as “young adult” in the first place? Game of Thrones is not at all treated this way…
Rebecca Roanhorse’s book Trail of Lightning, an urban fantasy with a Dinétah (Navajo) protagonist has “young adult” as its fifth most popular Goodreads shelf. The novel is adult and published by Saga, an adult SFF imprint.
S.A. Chakraborty’s adult fantasy novel City of Brass has “young adult” as its fourth most popular Goodreads shelf.
Tasha Suri’s Empire of Sand, an adult fantasy in a world based on Mughal India, has about equal numbers of people shelving it as “adult” or “young adult.”
Book Riot wrote an article on this, although they didn’t address how the problem intersects with race. I also did a Twitter thread a while back where I cited these examples and some more as well.
The topic of diversity in adult SFF is important to me, partly because we need to stop mislabeling the women of color who write it, and also because there’s a lot there that isn’t acknowledged! Besides, sometimes it’s good to see that your stories don’t just end the moment you leave high school and that adults can still have vibrant and interesting futures worth reading about. I feel like this is especially important with queer rep, for a number of reasons.
Other books and authors in the tweets I screenshot include:
- Witchmark by C.L. Polk
- A Ruin of Shadows by L.D. Lewis
- The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
- The Day Before by Liana Brooks
- A Phoenix First Must Burn edited by Patrice Caldwell
- Shri, a book blogger at Sun and Chai
- Vanessa, a writer and blogger at The Wolf and Books
TLDR: Women who write adult fantasy, especially women of color, are presumed to be writing young adult, which is problematic in that it internalizes diversity, dismisses the need and presence of diversity in adult fantasy, and plays into sexist assumptions of women writers.
Never forget the amount of hate R.F. Kuang got for explicitly stating that The Poppy War, one of the most triggering books I’ve ever read, should never be shelved as YA. She did so out of extreme concern of the content getting into the wrong hands without warning.
And then two days later Jay Kristoff said the same thing about Nevernight…and nothing happened.
gureshinlover
