Andrew Stanton - "Five Rules of Storytelling"

"Five Rules of Storytelling"
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Andrew Stanton

Andrew Stanton, a voice actor, screenwriter, film director, and producer at Pixar Animation Studios, has formulated five rules of storytelling, and these rules - according to the site Educational Technology and Mobile Learning - were taken by Karin Hueck and Rafael Quick (Brazilian culture and science magazine Superinteressante) and turned into the above visual for Stanton's TED Talk.

Here are the five rules, boiled down to a few words:

1. Make me care (i.e., about the protagonist).

2. Take me with you (i.e., with the protagonist).

3. Be intentional (i.e., about the protagonist's motives).

4. Let me like you (i.e., about the protagonist's likeability).

5. Delight me (i.e., about the audience's joy at the protagonist's success).

Obviously, these five rules are for stories with happy endings. Subverting one or several - as the diabolical Carter Kaplan suggested concerning Sean D'Souza's merely three rules of storytelling - makes for fun of the sort enjoyed by academics and literary critics!