Pixar's 22 Storytelling Rules Every Writer Should Know (Part 2)

If Part 1 (Rules 1–14) was about building your story's skeleton, Part 2 is about bringing it to life.

Rules 15–22 focus on the techniques that separate competent stories from unforgettable ones—how to make readers feel your characters' emotions, how to build tension that won't let go, and how to push past the creative walls every writer hits.

These are the rules that move your writing from "well-structured" to "I couldn't put it down."

Let's dive in.

Part Three: Practical Craft Techniques (Rules 15-22)

15. If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.

Fantasy worlds, time travel, alien invasions—none of it matters if the character's emotions don't ring true. Emotional honesty is what makes the impossible feel real.

Imagine a character who's just traveled back in time. If their first reaction is "Cool, time to fix everything"—readers disconnect. That's not how a real person would react. A real person would be terrified, disoriented, questioning their sanity. "Is this real? Am I losing my mind?"

Pixar understands this instinctively. In Up, Carl Fredricksen is a grumpy old man tied to his dead wife's memory. His emotions aren't heroic—they're painfully, beautifully human. That's why audiences cry within the first ten minutes. The fantastical premise of a flying house works because Carl's grief feels so achingly real.

Ursula K. Le Guin mastered this in The Left Hand of Darkness. Despite an alien world with radically different biology, the emotional core—loneliness, trust, the tentative bridge between strangers—is universal.

16.What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don't succeed? Stack the odds against.

Most stories that feel flat have one thing in common: the stakes aren't clear enough. If your protagonist fails, what do they actually lose? If the answer is "nothing much"—you've lost your reader.

Stakes don't have to be world-ending. Sometimes the most powerful stakes are deeply personal.

Consider these Pixar examples:

Notice how each one is specific and irreversible. Not "things might get worse." Not "there could be trouble." A concrete, devastating consequence.

• In No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy makes the stakes visceral on every page—one wrong step, and Llewelyn Moss dies.

  

• In The Hunger Games, Katniss faces death in every chapter.

  

• In literary fiction like Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, the stakes are quieter but no less devastating—the characters are running out of time, and there is no escape.

  

17. No work is ever wasted. If it's not working, let go and move on—it'll come back around to be useful later.

That 50,000-word manuscript you abandoned? It wasn't a failure. It was training.

Every unfinished draft, every scrapped chapter, every idea that didn't pan out—they all become part of your creative vocabulary. A scene you cut from one story might become the emotional core of the next. A character who didn't work in a fantasy setting might come alive in a thriller.

Pixar itself has shelved entire projects. Early versions of Ratatouille were scrapped and reworked from scratch. The original concept for Brave went through a complete overhaul. Those "failed" versions informed and enriched the final films.

Neil Gaiman has said that ideas are compost—they break down and feed the soil for new growth. Stephen King famously trunked his early novels, only to revisit elements from them years later. Toni Morrison revised Beloved for years, discarding entire drafts that eventually shaped the masterpiece.

And if you're stuck right now? Move on. Skip to the next scene. Write a different chapter. Start something new. The blockage often dissolves when you stop staring at it.

Your takeaway: Don't mourn abandoned work—mine it. And when you're stuck, don't force it. Move forward. The answer will come when you're not looking for it.

18. You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.

Revision is essential. But there's a line between productive revision and anxious tinkering—and many writers cross it without realizing.

If you've rewritten chapter one fifteen times and still haven't started chapter two, that's not perfectionism. That's avoidance. You're not making the story better; you're hiding from the terrifying uncertainty of what comes next.

Pixar's approach is instructive: storytelling is testing, not refining. They create rough story reels—basically animated storyboards—and screen them for internal audiences early and often. The goal isn't perfection. It's feedback. Does this work? Does this land? What falls flat?

If you're writing serial fiction, this is your superpower. You can publish, observe reader reactions, and adjust. A 70% quality chapter that gets reader feedback is more valuable than a 95% quality chapter that sits on your hard drive forever.

Anne Lamott's famous advice in Bird by Bird rings true here: give yourself permission to write terrible first drafts. The first draft is just you telling yourself the story. The magic happens in revision—but you can't revise what doesn't exist.

19. Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.

This might be the most practical rule in the entire list.

Readers will happily accept coincidence that creates conflict. Harry Potter just happens to be The Chosen One—fine. Frodo just happens to find the One Ring—sure. These coincidences set the story in motion, and that's their job.

But coincidence that resolves conflict? That's the fastest way to destroy reader trust.

In Toy Story, Woody and Buzz ending up at Sid's house is coincidence—and it creates brilliant conflict. But their escape is not coincidence. Woody devises a plan, rallies the other toys, and outsmarts Sid through courage and cleverness. The resolution is earned.

The ancient Greeks had a term for the ultimate storytelling sin: deus ex machina—literally, "god from the machine." In Greek theater, a crane would lower an actor playing a god onto the stage to magically resolve everything. Audiences tolerated it then. Modern readers won't.

Think of how frustrating it is when a character is cornered and then—conveniently—a long-lost ally appears, or they discover a hidden power, or the villain makes an inexplicable mistake. That's the writer rescuing their character instead of letting the character rescue themselves.

Donna Tartt's The Secret History is a masterclass in this. Every consequence flows from the characters' own choices. No one swoops in to save them. J.R.R. Tolkien's eagles in The Lord of the Rings have been debated for decades precisely because they feel like a deus ex machina—a reminder of how sensitive readers are to this principle.

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

In Rule 10("Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you've got to recognize it before you can use it."), we talked about dissecting stories you love. This rule flips that exercise on its head.

Think of a novel or film that disappointed you.
Don't just dismiss it—diagnose it. Where did it go wrong?

• Was the protagonist passive and boring? → What if they had a strong opinion that created conflict?

• Was the pacing glacially slow? → What if you cut the first three chapters entirely?

• Was the ending a cop-out? → What if the protagonist paid a real price for victory?

• Was the villain one-dimensional? → What if you gave them a genuinely sympathetic motivation?

This is one of the most powerful exercises a writer can do, because it trains your editorial instinct. You stop being a passive consumer of stories and become an active problem-solver.

Brandon Sanderson does a version of this in his creative writing lectures at Brigham Young University—he encourages students to identify exactly what failed in a story and propose specific fixes. It sharpens your ability to see structural problems in your own work.

21.You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can't just write 'cool'. What would make YOU act that way?

We've all seen it: a character does something spectacular—an impossible sword technique, a devastating one-liner, a dramatic sacrifice—and it looks awesome on paper. But it rings hollow.

Because the writer was chasing spectacle, not truth.

"Would this character really do this?" is the question that separates memorable scenes from forgettable ones. It doesn't matter how visually stunning or emotionally manipulative a moment is—if it doesn't flow naturally from who the character is, readers will feel the disconnect.

In Breaking Bad, Walter White's transformation is terrifying because every escalation feels psychologically inevitable. Vince Gilligan didn't write "cool" villain moments—he wrote a man making choices that a desperate, brilliant, egotistical person would make.

Flannery O'Connor wrote that a story's meaning must be embodied in the concrete details of the characters' lives. Don't move your characters like chess pieces toward dramatic moments. Instead, understand them so deeply that the dramatic moments emerge organically from who they are.

22. What's the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.

This is both the simplest and the hardest rule on the list.

If you can't distill your story into a single sentence, it might be trying to do too many things at once.

Notice that each sentence contains: a character, a conflict, and the emotional heart of the story.

This isn't just a writing exercise—it's a diagnostic tool. If your one-sentence summary feels vague or cluttered, that's a signal your story might lack focus. And if you're pitching to agents, editors, or collaborators, this sentence is your story's heartbeat in verbal form.

Kurt Vonnegut's advice was similar: every story should be reducible to a single dramatic question. If you know that question, everything in your story either serves it or should be cut.

Putting It All Together: A Practical Framework

Trying to apply all 22 rules at once will overwhelm you. Instead, use them at the right stage of your creative process:

The Real Secret Behind Pixar's Magic

Pixar's 22 rules aren't just animation tips. They're principles rooted in how humans experience stories—the psychology of empathy, tension, surprise, and catharsis.

From Toy Story to Inside Out, every Pixar film that's made the world laugh and cry did so because it followed these principles. Not as rigid formulas, but as guiding instincts.

Whether you're writing your first novel, developing a screenplay, or deep into a serialized fiction project, these 22 rules offer something rare: practical wisdom that actually works.

Don't try to memorize them all. Instead, keep them nearby. When something in your story feels off—when a scene falls flat or a character feels hollow—come back to this list. The answer is usually here.

Now close this tab. Open your manuscript.

Write.

✍️ Ready to bring your story to life?

Novela is a writing tools built for storytellers
—with integrated tools for character management, plot organization, and distraction-free drafting. Whether you're outlining your first novel or managing a complex multi-arc series, Novela keeps your creative world in one place.

Start writing on Novela →