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Meg Waite Clayton

New York Times Bestselling Author

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January 12, 2017 By Meg Waite Clayton

What I learned at PixarHow to Write a Good Beginning

One of my 59 new things I’m trying to do in my 59th year is writing a screenplay. Today, for One Thing Thursday, I offer this very short video to watch. It features Pixar screenwriter Michael Arndt, and is a terrific tutorial (or reminder) for how to get a story started, with easy-to-follow, examples.
The executive summary:
He starts with a metaphor, that trying to write is like climbing a mountain blindfold, and then points out that the hardest bit of that … is finding the mountain.
The summary (but really, watch it!) is that if the first 20 pages or so of a screenplay (or the first few chapters of a novel), you need to establish:
1. Your main character, and their setting
2. Your main character’s “grand passion”: show them doing the thing that defines who they are as a person
3. A hidden flaw that arises out of that grand passion–a good thing that has been taken too far (The examples he gives here are pride and insecurity)
4. Storm clouds gathering.
5. Baboom! Something comes in and turns your hero’s life upside down, and that grand passion gets taken away from them–and that something should have an element of absolute unfairness
and then … this bit is pretty interesting:
6. Faced with a choice, your hero eschews the high-road healthy reaction, and instead takes the low-road, unhealthy choice. And yet it’s what the audience wants him to do, because we feel his pain.
If he takes the high road, “You really don’t have a story.”
Trust me, it makes sense if you watch it.

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Meg Waite Clayton

Meg Waite Clayton is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of THE LAST TRAIN TO LONDON, a Jewish Book Award finalist based on the true story of the Kindertransport rescue of ten thousand children from Nazi-occupied Europe—and one brave woman who helped them escape. Her six prior novels include the Langum-Prize honored The Race for Paris and The Wednesday Sisters, one of Entertainment Weekly's 25 Essential Best Friend Novels of all time. A graduate of the University of Michigan and its law school, she has also written for the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Forbes, Runners World, and public radio, often on the subject of the particular challenges women face. megwaiteclayton.com

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