I Stole 13 Storytelling Secrets From Pixar For Copywriting

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In 2011, a Pixar employee named Emma Coats wrote a Twitter thread on the 22 rules for storytelling. They're an absolute masterclass in story, psychology, and human persuasion.

In this article, I'm going to show you exactly how I use these storytelling secrets to write highly addictive emails to over 5,000 creators & copywriters every single day.

If you're interested in stealing the secrets from the world's greatest storytellers so you can become a better writer and even sell more of your own products, then this is going to be the best article you read all day.

I'm going to specifically break down the 13 rules that I've personally used.

Rule #1: You Admire a Character for Trying More Than Their Successes

In this context — via my daily emails — I am my own character. I write personal stories coming from me to my customers and readers, offering products that I sell on my own.

You are your own character in your brand, whether you have a YouTube channel, a Twitter following, an email-based business like mine.

The idea is that you are a character that your readers like. You want your readers to like you, and they want you to succeed — but they don't want you to succeed easily.

People don't like it when somebody is just constantly winning with no obstacles. It's no fun to read. So you have to sprinkle in:

The hard roads
The detours
The things that have been thrown your way that tried to stop you from success

This is the opposite of what most gurus try to teach you — always posting your wins, wins, wins. But people want to see the humanity in your storytelling.

You have to overcome obstacles. It makes your storytelling far more addictive because people don't know whether you're going to get there or not. It also creates this underdog tone, because they want to continue to cheer for you.

In essence: no great story has ever been told about a character who did everything right.

Example: I wrote a story where I had the biggest product launch of my life but I was running on fumes because I’d been up for almost 48 hours straight writing promo emails.

Rule #2: Keep in Mind What's Interesting to Your Audience, Not What's Fun to You as a Writer

They often can be very different.

The sweet spot in your writing and storytelling needs to be in the middle of:

What do you want to write?
What do your readers want to read?

You are focused on your reader's journey. Your writing is a mirror to their experience. They see themselves in your journey, but you have to write the things they want to read.

So before I ever put pen to paper , I'm always thinking: Is this going to be interesting to my readers? Is this what they like?

A lot of times I'll point it back to data. I go back to emails I've written before that got a lot of replies, a lot of purchases on my products. Or if you've written threads — what have they liked before? That gives you an inclination of what your readers enjoy and what they don't. Spend more time writing the stories they enjoy.

Example: I wrote a fictional comic book style story as my email one day. Which is wildly untypical in the copywriting niche. My readers loved it. That email got an insane amount of replies. So I wrote more emails like that.

Rule #6: What Is Your Character Comfortable With? Throw the Opposite at Them.

What is your character good at? Challenge them. Make them respond.

In this essence — if you are the character — what is the thing you're really, really good at? Try something else in life to create stories that increase the amount of obstacles for you.

I know this sounds counterintuitive. You want to continue to win. But remember Rule #1: people don't want to read about someone who's always succeeding and everything goes right for them.

Here's how I apply this personally:

I'm a clientless copywriter. I don't write for clients — almost ever. I write my own stuff and build my own products. But every once in a while, I will take on a client in a niche I've never written for before, just for the story — to see how it goes.

Sometimes it goes crazy and I get a viral story, like the time I wrote on Twitter about firing a $6,000 client.
Sometimes it goes really, really well and I still get the story.

Do things in your life that make you — the character — get out of your comfort zone, so you can at least get a story out of it.

Rule #7: Come Up with an Ending Before You Figure Out the Middle

Endings are hard. The way I use this in my email storytelling is I always get in front of my readers about what I am trying to accomplish next.

Whether it's:

Launching a new business
A personal hobby
Breaking 90 in my golf game

There's always some goal, some ending that I am chasing after — and I'm guiding my reader along in the journey so they know exactly what I'm chasing.

It gives them clarity. It gives them a map. And you don't always have to give away the ending, but at least knowing your end goal will give you a map of what to write towards.

Example: I often tell stories about the ups and downs of building my Skool community — CopyCreator Club. My readers know the “ending” of me building a fully autonomous business, which makes the journey towards that ending way more intriguing to them.

They think, “will he fail? or will he win?”

Rule #8: Finish Your Story, Even If It's Not Perfect

In an ideal world you have both, but move on and do better next time.

People often ask me, "How do you write a daily email?" The perfectionist in them — or the idea of coming up with stories — makes them feel like not every single thing you write is going to be gold.

But the more you write, the more chances your writing is going to get better and better and better.

I've personally put myself on the hook that every day I'm going to tell one story to my audience. I'm going to try and make it as amazing as possible. But some days? It is what it is. You ship it. You move on.

This is the best way to become an incredible storyteller:

Show up every day
Write a story — your email, your thread, whatever it is
Ship it
Move on
Do better tomorrow

Reps = excellence

Rule #10: Pull Apart the Stories You Like

What you like in them is part of you. You've got to recognize it before you can use it.

This is something I recommend every copywriter and writer has — a swipe file.

Every time I read something that's incredibly interesting — especially a story — I put it in my digital swipe file. I keep a Notion folder with all the great stories. I copy and paste them in, move them along, and try to figure out: What is it that I like about this story?

Specifically — the things that made me buy something. If your story or email made me buy something, I try to reverse-engineer that:

> What emotions did you trigger that made me so enticed that I actually spent money on this thing?

And I use that in my copywriting tactics. Understanding what makes you tick as the audience will help put your brain in the audience's shoes when you are writing for them.

Example: I read a story from Ben Settle one time about him sleeping under his office desk during a hard period in his life trying to sell a pyramid scheme product. He then learned copywriting and was able to change his life. It inspired me to learn copy.

Rule #11: Putting It on Paper Lets You Start Fixing It

If it stays in your head, you'll never share it with anyone.

One of the best pieces of wisdom I've gotten from my mentors and other writers is this:

> Writing begets writing.

Meaning — you're not writing once you get the idea. You're writing to get the idea.

Sometimes I've had just a crinkle of a thought — hm, what is that? — and then I start writing it. Just a draft. Nobody has to see it. And you let the idea come to you. You let the story evolve on its own as you are writing.

Often when I write my 500, 600, 700-word emails, I barely have a sentence — just something like, I think this is the direction I want to go in — and I just keep going and let it flow out. Often I ship those stories with very little editing because the way they've evolved on their own is really, really natural.

Don't worry about perfecting the idea before you start writing it out. Write it out to get the idea.

Rule #13: Give Your Characters Opinions

This specific rule reminds me of that part in Revelation in the Bible where it talks about how God will spit out the lukewarm.

The same thing is true with your audience.

When you write lukewarm — when you're not for or against anything — your writing becomes really boring. It's not interesting at all. People want to know:

What is your character for? What do they love? What are they passionate about? What are they striving for?
What is your character against? What do they hate? What do they find evil in the world?

You have to have those two things in your branding. You have to have a brand enemy and a brand ally in your writing. And oftentimes it's best to have one of each that you develop over time.

Think Harry Potter and Voldemort. He has a huge enemy that took seven books to defeat. People don't get sick of your enemy — they continue to rally around that conflict.

This is going to create super fans for your brand. And it's also going to repel the people who honestly you want nothing to do with your reading anyway.

Example: I often write emails about my intense hate for the corporate 9-5 world. The long commutes. The ridiculous meetings. The oppressing c-suite executives. This fires up my readers and gets them to rally around these stories with me.

Rule #14: Why Must You Tell This Story?

What is the burning belief in you that your story feeds off of?

Whenever you sit down to tell a story, you have to go back to the heart of it and ask: Why did I think this was good anyway? What made me think — man, that would be super fun to tell?

The heart of the story is often the same emotion you're actually trying to emulate in your reader.

Did it make you happy?
Did it make you sad?
Did it make you angry?

That's what makes a good story — the heart of it gave you some sort of emotion, and you're trying to replicate that emotion in the person reading it. That's going to guide the way you write your stories, because you're going to use certain verbiage to evoke certain emotions. And that emotion originally started with you.

Example: One of my most repeated stories is when I got robbed by a pastor. I’ve told that story so many times because it has two major emotions — a beginning and middle that makes you furiously angry and an end that couldn’t make you happier.

Rule #15: If You Were Your Character in This Situation, How Would You Feel?

Honesty lends credibility — and if you're a copywriter like me, credibility is the number one resource to salesmanship. Because people are not buying your product. They're buying you.

Especially in a business like mine, where it's a personal branded business — not a logo or anything like that.

Some of the best emails I've ever written — emails that people replied to and bought from — are when I genuinely just wore my heart on my sleeve:

I've told stories where I've been angry at clients who shafted me in the past, and I was just really honest about how pissed off they made me.
I've told heartfelt stories where I was struggling with my business, thinking about past times, and I was really honest about it.

And those have built the most trust. People say, "Oh, he's not just some fake guru trying to sell his stuff. This guy's a real human — with a family, with emotions, with life, with problems, with wins, with successes." And they can relate to that.

Vulnerability is so rare nowadays that when you inject it into your storytelling, it makes people really believe it's worth reading.

Rule #16: What Are the Stakes? Give Us a Reason to Root for the Character.

What happens if they don't succeed? Stack the odds against them.

Stakes is one of the most underrated forms of storytelling. I like to combine this with the "know your ending" rule. What is the thing you're trying to reach as a character?

Here's how it works:

Let's say you as a one person business, you are on a mission to retire your parents. You are the character. The ending is that you've achieved is retired parents. Now ask: What are the stakes if you do not achieve that?

You have to make the stakes detrimental — not just to yourself, but to your reader. That increases the chances that people are genuinely rooting for you to keep going.

If you don’t retire your parents, will they:

Have to live in a foreign and oppressed country?
Experience a life of stress over money forever?
Have to work until they do and you never see them?

Your readers want you to achieve your goals.

So you start building this super fan base of people who see:

Your goal
All the odds stacked against you
All the things you can't overcome
"You have to learn this. You don't have time. You have a family depending on you."

All of these things create stakes. And stakes make people care.

Rule #17: No Work Is Ever Wasted

If it's not working, let go and move on. It'll come back around to be useful later.

I cannot tell you how many times I've started writing a story, an email, a thread — whatever — and I just think, man, I'm not feeling it. This isn't hitting me. I don't think I have it.

It's not wasted.

Here's what I do instead:

Leave that document
Walk away for a couple hours
Go play a round of golf, hang out with my kids, read a book, work on something else
Come back a couple days later, a week later, two weeks later
Tip-tap that story again — and bam, it clicks

I have reused stories I thought were completely dead and brought them back to life.

My system for this:

I use Notion and set it up like a Kanban board with three columns:

Haven't Started
Currently Writing
Published

I have so many things sitting in "Currently Writing." And I cannot tell you how many times I'll click through and go, "What is this story?" — and then I come back, rewrite it, and it's great.

Give yourself an opportunity to finish it later. You don't have to knock it out today.

Rule #22: What Is the Essence of Your Story?

And what's the most economical way of telling it? If you know that, you can build it out from there.

The essence of your story is what we call in copywriting your big idea. Your story should have:

One big idea
One main thing you're trying to get across
One plot
One guidance towards the end result

Especially when you're writing short stories like I am — 500 to 600-word emails — you're not writing a 500-page novel. We're writing Twitter threads. We're writing emails. We're writing ads. We're using these stories in the most economical way possible:

What's the beginning?
What's the middle?
What's the end?
What's the one thing I'm trying to get across?

Most people make the mistake of interweaving:

Too many concepts
Too many characters
Too many stories
Too many plot lines

And trying to condense all of that into 500 words is so confusing to the reader. They just don't understand: What is the point of this?

The fewer the characters. The fewer the plot lines. The fewer the angles. Start there. Get it to its bare essence. And if you're an advanced enough writer and you can add some twist, some turns, without actually diluting the story itself — then do that. But start as simple and basic as possible.

Wrapping Up

That's it. Those are the 13 Pixar storytelling secrets that I think are going to help you become a highly addictive writer — and sell more of your stuff, grow your business, and really get your writing out there.

If you enjoyed these tips, then you are definitely going to love my free copywriting guide called **Copywriting Secrets Cheat Sheet.** It carries 41 advanced copywriting techniques on how to be highly persuasive with your writing to sell more of your stuff.

Until next time,

Alin “Story Seller” Dragu