“I stop for yard sales,” says Annie, in her classic article from The New York Times Writer’s on Writing column.

“A whole set of metaphoric shovels is part of my tool collection, and for me the research that underlies the writing is the best part of the scribbling game.”

“I listen attentively in bars and cafes, while standing in line at the checkout counter, noting particular pronunciations and the rhythms of regional speech, vivid turns of speech and the duller talk of everyday life.”

“The need to know has taken me from coal mines to fire towers, to hillsides studded with agate, to a beached whale skeleton, to the sunny side of an iceberg, to museums of canoes and of windmills, to death masks with eyelashes stuck in the plaster, to shipyards and log yards, old military forts, wildfires and graffiti’d rocks, to rough water and rusty shipwrecks, to petroglyphs and prospectors’ diggings, to collapsed cotton gins, down into the caldera of an extinct volcano and, once or thrice in the middle distance, in view of a snouty twister.”

Perhaps you have found, like Annie, that a preference for the craft of writing pushes you towards places, observations, and experiences you wouldn’t have otherwise noticed.  Perhaps it’s your noticing that pushes you to write.  Read more of Annie’s preferred digging grounds at nytimes.com, and don’t forget your shovel!

Today’s Writing Protip comes from the excellent screenwriting blog “Go Into The Story” by Scott Myers.

Scott is a strong advocate of reading screenplays to help you hone your own writing craft.  In a thorough 7 part series, Scott goes through all the intimate details of giving a screenplay a good close read.  Here’s some tidbits to get you started:

“Sit down and read the script. Personally I like to turn off my analytical mind as much as possible and simply read the story for what it is. Obviously if I have thoughts and observations, I don’t chase them away. Rather I quickly jot them down, then move on.

The main point of a first pass is to read it straight-through in one sitting, trying as much as possible to stay within the story universe. Save the analysis for later.

If you really want to read a script in order to analyze it, you have to shut everything else down. I know, I know, how can you possibly give yourself permission to set aside 90 minutes or so to read a script with no breaks, no interruptions, no distractions, just you and the story?

Let me put it to you this way: Are you serious about learning the craft? If you are, then you will find the strength of will to shut everything down when you read and engage a script. If you aren’t, well… go ahead and answer you email.

In order for stories to reveal themselves to us requires a mindfulness on our part. We have to be here now in order to enter fully into a story universe, muck around in there, break things apart, and explore the vital parts of the whole. Indeed this is great training for us and our writing because it requires the same immersion and intensity as sitting down to write.”

Read the rest over at The Black List

The AV Club recently interviewed Katherine Sarafian and Mark Andrews of Pixar, Producer and Director of the new movie Brave.  Here are some highlights:

AVC: About that original pitch—Pixar has made the point of how many firsts Brave represents: first female protagonist, first fairy tale, etc. Did any of that come into consideration at the studio, in the process of picking a new project?

MA: No, no.

KS: I think it [would] screw up our story process. If we think in firsts, it starts to put a boundary around what the movie is going to be, or we start becoming a slave to, “What was a princess before?” and, “What a girl should do,” or you start getting into artificial constraints.

MA: You’re serving the wrong master. You’re serving this idea of a genre, or what something should be, instead of going, “I need to make a character that is going to be appealing, that’s going to be inspirational, that’s going to be strong, that’s going to have a great arc so I’m going to care about this person, and be invested in this person.” Who is that? Regardless of whether they’re a woman, a man, a fish, a rat, a car, a bug, a toy. That’s where we always start. We start with the core. It is always the character, and the story is driven by the character. We just keep focus on that. We’re just, “Stop! Stop! I don’t care that it’s a girl, or our first princess, or that Disney has done these kinds of things before! We’re doing it our way! Just shut up, sit back!” We just focus on that; to make that character compelling, we have to do that.

AVC: You mentioned making Merida inspirational. That isn’t necessarily on most people’s lists for a children’s-movie character. How important is that factor?

MA: The one thing I love about telling stories is, we spend our whole lives going in and out of being better or worse, in our own character. But in a movie, the character transforms into the best they’re going to be. So you take a whole life, what we live, that we have to constantly work at, and we shove it down into 80 minutes so we can see what this person goes through. We can see the human condition at high speed. That creates more intensity and more stakes in the story, but what we get out of that is like [claps], “That person overcame everything, and boy, that’s inspirational. That’s what I’m going to do.” It empowers us.

Head to the AV club for the full interview

Mark Andrews