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    “The Clues to a Great Story” by Andrew Stanton

    Görkem Gümüştekin • public
    • 5 min read
    “The Clues to a Great Story” by Andrew Stanton

    Table of contents

    Stanton shares insights from his experience as a storyteller, emphasizing the importance of engaging audiences through relatable characters and elements of curiosity, anticipation, and surprise.

    For Key Ideas, Questions and Quotes from this talk, you can scroll below.

    Andrew Stanton gave this speech at the TED Conference. All rights to the speech and the video above belong to TED.

    About Andrew Stanton

    Andrew Ayers Stanton (born December 3, 1965) is an American filmmaker and voice actor based at Pixar, which he joined in 1990. (Source: Wikipedia)

    Key Ideas From Talk

    I have been interested in writing for a long time, which indirectly led me to become interested in storytelling as well. Writing is actually telling a story for me. That's why when I see content related to storytelling, it immediately catches my attention. I was curious about the ways to become a good storyteller and that's why I watched Andrew's speech. Besides being worth watching, I really liked these insights in his talk;

    1. Make the audience care: Stanton emphasizes the importance of creating characters and situations that evoke empathy from the audience. By making the audience care about the characters and their journey, you can keep them engaged throughout the story.
    2. The power of storytelling in revealing truth: Stanton believes that storytelling is not just about entertainment but also about revealing truth. He encourages storytellers to use their stories to explore universal human experiences and emotions, allowing the audience to connect on a deeper level.
    3. The importance of keeping the audience's interest: Stanton discusses the concept of "wonder" and its role in storytelling. He suggests that by piquing the audience's curiosity and keeping them engaged, you can create a sense of wonder that keeps them invested in the story.
    4. Create a well-defined structure: Stanton emphasizes the need for a clear and well-defined structure in storytelling. He encourages storytellers to establish a strong beginning, middle, and end, with a clear central theme that drives the narrative forward.
    5. Use the power of anticipation: Stanton highlights the effectiveness of building anticipation in storytelling. By setting up questions or conflicts and gradually revealing answers, you can keep the audience engaged and invested in the outcome.
    6. Appeal to both logic and emotion: Stanton believes that a great story should engage both the audience's intellect and emotions. By combining logical and emotional elements, you can create a more well-rounded and compelling narrative.
    7. Embrace the concept of "emotional truth": Stanton discusses the importance of conveying emotional truth in storytelling. He suggests that even in fictional stories, the emotional core should be authentic and relatable, allowing the audience to connect with the characters and their experiences.
    8. Craft a memorable and satisfying ending: Stanton emphasizes the significance of a strong ending in storytelling. He suggests that a great story should deliver a satisfying resolution that fulfills the emotional journey of the characters and leaves a lasting impact on the audience.

    Questions to Ask Ourselves

    1. How effectively am I making my own stories or personal experiences relatable and engaging to others?
    2. Am I using storytelling to explore and express universal truths or emotions that resonate with people, or am I holding back?
    3. How curious and open-minded am I when it comes to exploring new ideas and incorporating wonder into my storytelling?
    4. How well-structured are my narratives, and do they have a clear beginning, middle, and end that drive the story forward?
    5. How successful am I at building anticipation and suspense in my storytelling to keep the audience engaged and invested?
    6. Am I effectively balancing intellectual and emotional appeal in my storytelling, or am I leaning more towards one side?
    7. How authentic and truthful are my stories, even if they are fictional, in conveying genuine emotions and experiences?
    8. Are my story endings memorable and impactful, leaving a lasting impression on the audience?

    Notes From Talk

    ✒️
    We all love stories. We're born for them. Stories affirm who we are. We all want affirmations that our lives have meaning. And nothing does a greater affirmation than when we connect through stories. It can cross the barriers of time, past, present and future, and allow us to experience the similarities between ourselves and through others, real and imagined.
    ✒️
    What this scene is doing, and it did in the book, is it's fundamentally making a promise. It's making a promise to you that this story will lead somewhere that's worth your time. And that's what all good stories should do at the beginning, is they should give you a promise.
    ✒️
    Make the audience put things together. Don't give them four, give them two plus two. The elements you provide and the order you place them in is crucial to whether you succeed or fail at engaging the audience. Editors and screenwriters have known this all along. It's the invisible application that holds our attention to story. I don't mean to make it sound like this is an actual exact science, it's not. That's what's so special about stories, they're not a widget, they aren't exact. Stories are inevitable, if they're good, but they're not predictable.
    ✒️
    I took a seminar in this year with an acting teacher named Judith Weston. And I learned a key insight to character. She believed that all well-drawn characters have a spine. And the idea is that the character has an inner motor, a dominant, unconscious goal that they're striving for, an itch that they can't scratch.
    ✒️
    When you're telling a story, have you constructed anticipation? In the short-term, have you made me want to know what will happen next? But more importantly, have you made me want to know how it will all conclude in the long-term? Have you constructed honest conflicts with truth that creates doubt in what the outcome might be?
    ✒️
    I truly understood the notion of story having a theme. That was the theme: Who are you? Here were all these seemingly disparate events and dialogues that just were chronologically telling the history of him, but underneath it was a constant, a guideline, a road map. Everything Lawrence did in that movie was an attempt for him to figure out where his place was in the world. A strong theme is always running through a well-told story.
    ✒️
    The magic ingredient is, the secret sauce, is can you invoke wonder. Wonder is honest, it's completely innocent. It can't be artificially evoked. For me, there's no greater ability than the gift of another human being giving you that feeling -- to hold them still just for a brief moment in their day and have them surrender to wonder. When it's tapped, the affirmation of being alive, it reaches you almost to a cellular level. And when an artist does that to another artist, it's like you're compelled to pass it on. It's like a dormant command that suddenly is activated in you, like a call to Devil's Tower. Do unto others what's been done to you. The best stories infuse wonder.
    ✒️
    Use what you know. Draw from it. It doesn't always mean plot or fact. It means capturing a truth from your experiencing it, expressing values you personally feel deep down in your core.

    This talk is a part of following list: "Talks That Changed My Perspective".