Zach Baker: Story-Driven

Better late than never, here comes another summary of the Pixar event at the Creative Screenwriting Expo. Hey, if I can only get this stuff second-hand, I’ll take it.

Hey, did I mention the Brad Bird Splinecast?

So Po Bronson seems to be rebounding from his lame career-exploration book, taking a more Malcolm Gladwell turn in his recent New York Magazine article. It combines the Alfie Kohn’s basic work with some new studies and some self-esteem backlash. Not much new, but a good synthesis.

He touches some on the challenge of mentoring and managing the talented, which is something I became fascinated with when studying the attributes of animation directors.

I’ve noticed that masters of managing creative people don’t shower them with praise. They instead give them a few hailstones of well-chosen criticism.

As I mentioned in my first article on Pixar they have these attributes:

• They “get it” - they are master analyzers in their field. This lets them critique quickly and effectively. People who don’t “get it” are hard to take seriously and those who do are sought after for their thoughts.

• They’re enthusiastic - they clearly are excited about the work and about working with people to do it. So when they criticize work, it motivates even better work, rather than throwing a wet blanket on it.

• They have a definite critical opinion - they know what they’re looking for and criticize freely. They don’t temper their critique to be accepted, to seem friendly, to look sophisticated or to make more money.

• They focus on the right things - they offer specific criticism, picking apart something for its strengths and weaknesses. They aren’t satisfied with just telling you their general opinion – they’ll tell you “I didn’t like it, and here’s why…”

I’m really fascinated by the subject of managing the talented, from sports to business to arts to oneself and even to parenting. Talent is limited most by our limitations in directing it.

I enjoyed Adam from Bitscribe’s take on rewriting software. Joel can be such a curmudgeon.

The focus of a from-scratch rewrite should be clarity, not generality. A simple rule I’ve come up with after going through many rewrites, some not very successful.

If adding clarity is paying down accumulated programmer debt, adding generality is deficit spending. Big Rewrites that get carried away expanding the scope of a system are the ones that turn tragic.

A big rewrite should be about taking advantage of the understanding from the previous version and refining the design to fit that understanding. There’s a strong need for an architectural YAGNI presumption on from-scratch rewrites.

After all, why rewrite from scratch? Same reason you rebuild a house from scratch – because the original has a crummy structure. But now you know how it should be. So get it working with the new structure and then worry about adding on.

My sympathies if you have a manager who is annoyed that you worked on the rewrite “just to have it do the same thing it already did.”

My wife and I were thinking about a Christmas present for her brother the other day. He’s 25 and single, so really, what do you get him? Not “something for the house,” not clothes, not DVDs or other stuff – he could care less about stuff for his home and if he wanted to buy anything else for himself, he’d probably have found a way to. I know, I was the same way before I hit 30 and got married and settled into a house. So let’s call it a rule of thumb: if you don’t know what a single, under-30 guy wants for a present, just get them cash or a gift card. Gift cards are of course just cash that’s laundered to be a gift in a socially acceptable way.

Not something said by Mister Rogers, but a quote that meant a lot to him, as recounted by his wife of over fifty years in the foreword of a book of his quotes:

A quote he loved especially – and carried around with him – was from Mary Lou Kownacki: “There isn’t anyone you couldn’t love once you’ve heard their story.” There were many times I wanted to be angry at someone, and Fred would say, “But I wonder what was going on in that person’s day.” His capacity for understanding always amazed me.

Andrew Stanton pointed this one out in a recent speech and it has really stuck with me. Both a challenging thought as well as a hopeful one.