I love Pixar movies.
If someone asks about the movies of my life, the first that come to mind are Toy Story 3 & 4 and Soul.
I'd always thought that beyond the creative, imaginative settings, their storytelling was exceptional, and then I came across a book called Pixar Storytelling (the Korean edition of The Best Story Wins by Matthew Luhn) as the topic of the first book club at Worthpick, a marketers' community.
Nine keywords for building a great story
The book presents nine keywords as the secret to compelling storytelling that moves people.
Starting with the hook in chapter 1, it introduces a range of ways to make the same story more compelling.
Personally, I'd found the "hook" part really hard in my day-to-day work, and I think this book helped me find a few things to improve.
Beyond that, each chapter conveys its points in an easy-to-follow way through the author's own experience and references as a former Pixar story artist, along with stories about Steve Jobs.
Maybe because Jobs was Pixar's CEO? You could feel an enormous respect for Steve Jobs throughout.
The "immutable law of writing" shows up, as always
One more thing that stuck with me: the wording may differ, but this book too mentions the most important method for growing as a writer, the classic three-part maxim: read a lot, write a lot, think a lot.
Simply put, "reading a lot, writing a lot, and thinking a lot" is the best way to improve your writing.
The idea that good writing only comes from writing every day and revising the first draft over and over reminded me of Haruki Murakami's Novelist as a Vocation, which I read last year.
Practice really is the most important virtue :)
PS. Since reading this book a couple of days ago, I've been trying a few changes to help my writing grow. The main one is unifying my tone to a consistently polite register (in Korean, using honorific speech throughout). Haha
That wasn't my intention, but when I reread my own posts later, they came across as pretty arrogant. Lesson learned.
Who I'd recommend it to
I recommend this book to anyone who loves Pixar's stories or is interested in growing as a writer.Read it alongside
Novelist as a Vocation, an essay collection by Haruki Murakami
