Andrew Stanton: The clues to a great story


Filmmaker Andrew Stanton ("Toy Story," "WALL-E") shares what he knows about storytelling -- starting at the end and working back to the beginning. (Contains graphic language ...)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Author interview: Chuck Heintzelman

How did you become interested in short stories? As a reader, I fell in love with short stories as a kid.  Especially Edgar Allen Poe.  Then Lovecraft and anything bizarre and weird I could get my hands on.  I plowed through magazines like Ripley's Believe It or Not, but really I became an indiscriminant reader, consuming anything and everything.
Unlike most authors, I wasn't pounding away at a typewriter in the womb.  I didn't start writing until my mid-30's.  Wow, that's ten years ago now.  After writing several deservedly unpublishable novels I started on short stories and began having lots of fun.  My goal this year is to create 50 new short stories.  I'm currently writing my seventh and having a blast doing it.
As an author, do you think writing short stories is worthwhile? Why? Absolutely.  The problem many authors I've talked to have is they have too many ideas.  Writing short stories allows you to explore more ideas in a shorter amount of time.  As far a…
Keep reading

Dean Wesley Smith on Making a Living With Short Stories

For those of you that missed the bandwagon, Dean Wesley Smith wrote a blog post that spelled out the math behind making a living with short stories.  It's an interesting post.  Well worth the read.  It's also the same thing I said six months ago but it's always nice to know others support your theory =)

The general gist of his post as that you have to bank on both quality and quantity.  As a short story writer, you have to crank out new stories constantly and be versatile enough to spread yourself out to different genres.  I agree with all of that.  What I didn't agree with was that he suggested pricing standalone short stories around 5,000 words at $2.99.

Which is why it was interesting to me that he followed that up with another post on book pricing.  He talks about consumer expectation.  People have been conditioned to pay $5 for a coffee.  Whereas in ebook land we have a whole crowd of authors that essentially know nothing about pricing models so we shoot ourselves…
Keep reading

Review of "Love, Everlasting," a short story by Maria Violante

Image
Summary: When Cole Harper wakes up in a cabin, gun in hand, he moves quickly to dispose of his girlfriend's body in the woods. Too bad she has other plans.

 Review: "Love, Everlasting" was twisted, creepy, mysterious... I liked it.  I feel I should clarify that this story is about a cocaine addict.  Normally druggie stories are not really up my ally.  More often than not I find myself losing interest as the story unfolds in a tedious manner with the protagonist trying to find more drugs.  But this was definitely not the case with Violante's short story.  I was actually irked when I had to pause reading it (something came up) because I wanted to find out what happens in the end.
Violante has a wonderful style of writing.  She obviously "gets" how to create mood with minimalist description.  Her story is face-paced but still feels like a complete experience at the same time.   I was a little worried while reading that it was going to have a cliche Hollywood-esq…
Keep reading