Pixar rules

There is a webpage that I stumbled across that explains Pixar's 22 rules of storytelling.  These rules were originally tweeted Pixar's Story Artist.  I have watched every single Pixar movie and most of them more than once including all there short films (even ones from the 1980's).  My personal favorite feature film has to be Finding Nemo with a close second of Up.  My favorite short film is Partly Cloudy.

I won't go through every rule on the list but there are a couple that I thought were great advices to creating a riveting story.  Most of the tips seem to be common sense to a writer but these are what I would consider helpful advices for any struggling writer no matter the genre.

Tip 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.

I like this tip because it forces the writer to question his motives of his/her writing.  Sometimes I feel I just babble on and on in my writing without saying anything but this tip addresses me, as a writer, to stay focus on the story.

Tip 20:  Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike.  How'd you rearrange them into what you do like?

There are plenty of movies I dislike but I think this tip is about movies that you might have enjoyed but the pacing and editing of the story is what hindered the enjoyment.  It is not about a movie a you hate and figure out what changes you can do to make it better.  In other words, if you hate the movie Twilight and you think the movie would have been better if it didn't have sparkling vampires in it, that is not what the tip is trying to get at.  If you mildly enjoy Twilight but you think the editing and storytelling was out of sync and you know how to make it run smoother, more to your liking and pace, then you have made a good story into a better one (*Not that I think Twilight was a good story but it was just an example).

For example, I would have like the movie Avatar but it was overly drawn out.  It was a sci-fi action movie but the beginning of the movie was rather slow and tedious.  I would have started out with an action sequence, like a scene from the end battle and then lead up to how we came to the beginning.  This would set the pace of the movie and give a hint to what to expect.