TEDtalk Tuesday: How to write better (moar storytelling)

Not an actual video.  They haven't posted it on youtube yet.

Click here to watch it on TED.com

This guy.

His name is Andrew Stanton, and even though sometimes he sounds like he's reading off of a script, he's a storyteller from Pixar, and he uses this TEDtalk to share what the essential parts of a good story are.


Since most of you in the class are creative writers, I feel like this is a good one for all of you.  Mr. Stanton here outlined some of the techniques we've learned in the last couple years and condensed them into a way that's easy to remember.  I'm not saying that I learned much more from him than I have from 4 years of learning to write, but I am saying that he connected some dots that gave me a nice "aha!" moment this morning as I watched this over my breakfast.


I don't have much time to go into detail, but the title of the TEDtalk is "The Clues to a Great Story", and he uses a swear word in the first 3 minutes of the talk.  =)


Because he works at Pixar, much of his storytelling is visual, so in addition to his jokes and seemingly scripted sentences, he also puts up strategic clips from films like Finding Nemo, Bambi, Wall-E, and even an outtake from the Toy Story storyboard.


Give it a watch--I know 19 minutes is long, but most of it is movie clips.  =)  Happy TEDtalk Tuesday!


Come back for Part 2, where I'll cover the talk in more detail and relate it to what I've learned as a writer.