![]() 21: You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like? 20: Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. 19:Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great coincidences to get them out of it are cheating. 18: You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. If it’s not working, let go and move on - it’ll come back around to be useful later. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against. 16: What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. 15: If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations. 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. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. 12: Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone. 11: Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. What you like in them is a part of you you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it. ![]() Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up. 9: When you’re stuck, make a list of what wouldn’t happen next. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. 8: Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. Endings are hard - get yours working up front. 7: Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. 6: What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff, but it sets you free. 3: Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about till you’re at the end of it. 2: You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. 1: You admire a character for trying more than for her or his successes. That's not interesting in itself, though - so I played with what wouldn't happen when the bounty hunter catches up to the outlaw, what wouldn't in a million years happen: The bounty hunter is after this outlaw because she stood him up on their wedding day.ĮMMA COATS’s 22 “STORYBASIC” RULES FOR STORYTELLING: That's where I got the idea for my film “Sweetpea.” I'd been watching “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” a lot and wanted to do something like the ‘superposse chase’ - a bounty hunter tracking a mysterious outlaw across the desert. TIP: So that obviously wouldn't happen next. And when something strikes your fancy, you move on to the next step, which is: You have complete license to come up with off-the-wall, interesting stuff. I heard it in an interview between John Cleese and William Goldman (one of my heroes - you may know him for writing a couple little movies called “The Princess Bride” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”), and to me it felt like discovering a cheat code for story. ![]() Lots of times, the material to get you unstuck will show up.Īctually, this one was the prompt for the short film I'm finishing up right now. TIP: When you’re stuck, make a list of what wouldn’t happen next. ![]() “The hate is laced with admiration, though, because you never give up.” “However, if you spin the tale of how you bet your PlayStation on an arm-wrestling contest and lost to some guy and you trained and trained and faced him again and lost your whole home theater this time, and you went and studied with an arm-wrestling master who trod upon your dreams but you couldn't be dissuaded from facing this guy again and you lost again and now he owns your vacation home - you're still going to meet with outright hate because seriously, you have awesome stuff and you're making terrible decisions. If you tell people how you found $300 on the sidewalk and bought a second PlayStation, the response you get is going to range from, “Cool story, bro” to outright hate. “Success without trials is meaningless, as you probably know if you've ever got something easy and then tried to share your triumph. These characters move forward when there's no hope of success, miles after any one of us in the audience would have given up. The deck is always stacked against Ripley's survival. “Indiana Jones fails at nearly everything he tries to do. TIP: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes. So as our own type of “exit interview,” Comic Riffs asked Coats to go into detail as to how she has put a few of her “rules” (22 of them are listed at the end of this post) into actual creative practice. Coats, who has also worked on Pixar’s “Monsters University” and the indie films “Sweetpea” and “Horizon” - is leaving Emeryville for Los Angeles as of Friday, as she takes her Pixar-honed education south to “seriously pursue a path directing live-action films.”
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