Words have been part of my life since I was ten years old when my father suggested I read a page from the dictionary each school night. “Words have lives and histories,” he said, ”make them your friends.” In my teens, I saw individual words setting the tone for how someone felt, and I promised myself one day I'd write a book about words and how they were a window to one's inner self. Little did I realize that when I wrote that book, it would morph into one about dialogue writing and achieve international kudos. The book offers this simple truth: make sure each line of dialogue moves your story forward...
This author is a renowned Master Teacher of storytelling art whose students have won numerous writing awards across the media spectrum. He covers dialogue writing for live theater, film, and television and offers suggestions on building effective dialogue writing skills, no matter the media, even showing how a dialogue line might change depending upon the writing category. He provides easy-to-follow examples of both good and bad dialogue writing in the various media categories.
The long-awaited follow-up to the perennially bestselling writers' guide Story, from the most sought-after expert in the art of storytelling. Robert McKee's popular writing workshops have earned him an international reputation. The list of alumni with Oscars runs off the page. The cornerstone of his program is his singular book, Story, which has defined how we talk about the art of story creation.
Now, in Dialogue, McKee offers the same in-depth analysis for how characters speak on the screen, on the stage, and on the page in believable and engaging ways. From Macbeth to Breaking Bad, McKee deconstructs key scenes…
I grew up living above our family funeral home. My parents were exceptionally compassionate people. I learned through their kind upbringing that heaven was and is, here and now. Death was not only an inevitable part of life but a daily part.As an adult, I became a Yoga Teacher. Yoga means union. It's an exploration into the intimate balance between body and mind. One particular yoga pose essential to every single class – Savasana or Corpse Pose. A coincidence a young girl raised in a funeral home would end up teaching daily classes of corpse pose? I think not. And through it all bloomed Floretta. The story of life and death coming together into a magnificent circular experience. Bilingual yet parallel worlds amidst beautiful chakra colors.
It sure takes a village to turn an award-winning Disney Pixar movie, Up into a Read-Aloud Storybook, and this cast of creative characters does it well! A terrific story about those significant changes in life and about not closing doors to the inevitable new adventures to come. Heart-warming and brilliantly crafted. See the movie! And do certainly read this lovely book version too.
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Up
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What is this book about?
A Little Golden Book retelling of Disney/Pixar Up! Meet Car and Russell. Carl is old and lonely. Russell is young and looking for a friend. When they’re thrown together on the adventure of a lifetime, they discover that friendships are great at any age! This Little Golden Book retelling of Disney/Pixar Up will appeal to adventurers of all ages.
I’m a stay-at-home working dad, and have handed my boys countless books to keep them entertained so I could get some work done. There’s something magical about giving your kid a book that sparks their love of reading. In my own experience, adventure books that made my boys laugh out loud would captivate my kids for hours…and keep them out of my hair.
Jorge and Rafael have created a lovable trio of heroes with Claudette, Marie, and (personal favorite) Gaston. These three friends go on an adventure to fight a dangerous giant while their entire town tries to stop them. The kids encounter all manner of magical foes who are more than meets the eye, adding up to an adventure that’s as surprising as it is hilarious.
Claudette's fondest wish is to slay a giant. But her village is so safe and quiet! What's a future giant slayer to do?
With her best friend Marie (an aspiring princess), and her brother Gaston (a pastry-chef-to-be), Claudette embarks on a super-secret quest to find a giant-without parental permission. Can they find and defeat the giant before their parents find them and drag them back home?
Giants Beware! offers up a wondrous, self-contained world in the tradition of the very best of Pixar. Claudette and her friends will have you laughing out loud from page one.
Ever since my primary school teacher read out my essay about a friendly octopus to the whole class, I’ve known I was a storyteller. I went on to enjoy a long career as a journalist–first, writing stories about rock and pop groups for the music paper Sounds (where I coined the term ‘The New Romantics’), then as editor of the pop magazine Record Mirror, and subsequently as a writer/editor for national newspapers including The Observer and The Sunday Telegraph. After that, I became a coach, a public speaking trainer, and a book editor. However, my most enduring passion is helping people find and tell their most meaningful stories.
I’m blowing a big chef’s kiss to this delicious little book.
Like gourmet cuisine, every ingredient is top quality and carefully chosen. The resulting dish is beautifully presented and full of flavour. You’ll find everything you need to know about how to tell a story well–from the 10 principles of storytelling to the gleaming detail and evoking the senses, delivered with verve and clarity by a seasoned scriptwriter and professor of storytelling.
The universe is made of stories, not atoms.' - Muriel Rukeyser. Today s world wants to know you and the real story behind why you do what you do. Whether you have a product to sell, a company mission to share or an audience to entertain, people are far more likely to engage and connect if you deliver a well-crafted story with an emotional core. Bobette Buster is a story consultant to major studios including Pixar, Disney and Sony Animation. In Do Story she teaches the art of telling powerful and engaging stories. With profiles of activists, leaders and visionaries,…
It has always fascinated me how one person can enter a room, and they can change its temperature, and yet others remain unnoticed. Some feel unstoppable, whilst others struggle to get out of bed. Some create such a resonant, kind, and compassionate coherence in everything they do and all those that they touch; it feels like they are surrounded by blue birds and sunshine, and yet many of their colleagues will not be remembered.To be human is complex and magical. I've spent my life learning how we can get our energy right so that every day becomes extraordinary and Technicolor, and that's why I help businesses do the same.
Alan Moore is an extraordinary character. I can't even remember how I met him, but ever since I have, my life has been significantly richer. He is a modern-day savant. He is the only person I have ever read who articulates so wonderfully why beauty should exist in every part of our lives, especially in business.
His touch and feel are exquisite as a designer, and when I read his book, I started to see things in ways I had never done before. He believes in a Beautiful Business–one that is not only beautiful on the outside to its consumers but in every aspect of its model, its impact, and its experience. Whilst reading it, I felt more alive and, with every page, more inspired to strive for a higher standard of beauty in everything I do.Such an exciting book by such a visionary writer.
So much goes unnoticed. We multi-task, switch between screens, work faster. When was the last time you paused to consider a beautifully made object or stunning natural landscape? Yet this is when our spirits lift, our soul is restored. Designer Alan Moore invites us to rethink not only what we produce – whether it’s a website, a handmade chair, or a business – but how and why. With examples including Pixar, Apple, and Blitz Motorcycles, we are encouraged to ask: Is it useful and considered. Is it a thing of beauty? Do Design will inspire you to: • Improve your…
I write about how our brain wires itself from experience, so it was fascinating to examine Steve Jobs's well-known story in that way. The book shows how each of his steps was built on the experiences that came before.
I loved the way the book manages to invoke the drama and suspense of the huge risks he took. Even though we know how the story turns out, the book really helped me understand how stressful things were while they were happening. Steve already had cancer when he developed the iPhone, but he kept pushing.
I appreciated the book’s even-handedness. It neither deifies him nor attacks him. It is rooted in interviews with many people who knew him, so you get a variety of perspectives.
THE SUNDAY TIMES AND #1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER - with a new foreword by Silicon Valley legend Marc Andreessen.
'For my money, a better book about Jobs than Walter Isaacson's biography' New Yorker
'A fascinating reinterpretation of the Steve Jobs story' Sunday Times
We all think we know who Steve Jobs was, what made him tick, and what made him succeed.
Yet the single most important question about him has never been answered.
The young, impulsive, egotistical genius was ousted in the mid-80s from the company he founded, exiled from his own kingdom and cast into the wilderness. Yet he returned…
As a kid, I had a lot of experience having a close group of friends… and a lot of experience looking into other groups from the outside. I waded from circle to circle, trying on friendships like some people try on hats. The books I’m recommending represent the best of fictional friend groups—the groups that topped any clique I saw in real life. Reading these books made me feel like an in-kid in the best possible way. Many of the characters remain the absolute coolest people I know, and serve as inspiration for the friend group dynamics I get to explore in my own stories.
Nothing bonds friends quite like climbing a disappearing mountain and ending up stranded on a literal cloud. The Lumberjanesseries takes place at the coolest summer camp ever, which was my ultimate dream as a kid. But in addition to all the tropes we love in a camp story, the series also features magical creatures so charming that they ought to star in their own Pixar movies. Plus, the name of the camp is Miss Qiunzella Thiskwin Penniquiqul Thistle Crumpet’s Camp for Hardcore Lady Types. I mean… best friend group setting ever, or best friend group setting ever?
Welcome to Miss Qiunzella Thiskwin Penniquiqul Thistle Crumpet's Camp for Hardcore Lady Types. The five scouts of Roanoke cabin-Jo, April, Molly, Mal, and Ripley-love their summers at camp. They get to hang out with their best friends, earn Lumberjane scout badges, annoy their no-nonsense counselor Jen . . . and go on supernatural adventures. That last one? A pretty normal occurrence at Miss Qiunzella's, where the woods contain endless mysteries.
Today is no exception. When challenge-loving April leads the girls on a hike up the TALLEST mountain they've ever seen, things don't go quite as planned. For one, they didn't…
My purpose is to help leaders connect to and manage their energy. I help them bring coherence to how they lead and reach their full societal impact. For more than a decade, I have coached 300 of the most senior leaders at some of the largest and most recognizable companies in the world. My recommended to-read book list represents crucible moments in my life and my calling to learn about human energy. Representing different lenses, which are key to adding to a mix of ingredients, allows the reader to drink a potion that will exalt all your buckets (physical, mental, emotional & spiritual) of energy holistically.
This book is the best book to get leaders to own the fact that unleashing an organization's creative power requires shifting its energy and culture and ripples from there. It all starts at the Top of The House. Through storytelling, it gave me two compelling insights.
First, it helped me see with clarity that we moved from living in a complicated world into a complex one; setting direction no longer works for leaders within organizations to thrive; now, it is required to shape context, and in return, your teams will feel safe to co-create.
Second, the authors very clearly define innovation in simple terms: Anything that is new and useful is innovative; it doesn’t have to be rocket science.
These insights gave me the courage to explore innovative ways to unleash energy within a system or organization.
Why can some organizations innovate time and again, while most cannot? You might think the key to innovation is attracting exceptional creative talent. Or making the right investments. Or breaking down organizational silos. All of these things may help--but there's only one way to ensure sustained innovation: you need to lead it--and with a special kind of leadership. Collective Genius shows you how. Preeminent leadership scholar Linda Hill, along with former Pixar tech wizard Greg Brandeau, MIT researcher Emily Truelove, and Being the Boss coauthor Kent Lineback, found among leaders a widely shared, and mistaken, assumption: that a "good" leader…
As both a professor of graphic design and creative director of Fast Company, I’m dedicated to helping others be more creative. At Fast Company, my job is to ensure the visuals for the world’s leading business media brand are consistently innovative. (Yea…no pressure.) Honestly, sometimes it’s tough to be innovative when I’m faced with a squeezed schedule, a towering to-do list, and a bargain basement budget. But, as a marathoner, I’ve learned that if you want to be successful, you need to push through sub-optimal circumstances. That’s where these five books come into play: they all provide relatable stories and insights into achieving success, despite tough odds. Let’s do this.
This book offers real-world examples of how peer feedback is critical to creative success. When I lose myself in the creative process, I rely on trusted collaborators to help dig me out of that hole.
Recognizing this is a universal problem for creatives, Ed Catmull introduces us to The Braintrust, a team at Pixar that provided feedback on movie scripts such as The Incredibles and Wall-E. I believe we all need our own personal Braintrust to be successful.
Part autobiography, part history of Pixar, part business book, Creativity Inc is a stimulating, feel-good, insightful and highly inspirational collection of lessons in creativity and business from the president of Pixar and Disney Animation, Ed Catmull.
'Just might be the best business book ever written.' -- Forbes Magazine 'Great book. Wish I could give it more than 5 Stars' -- ***** Reader review 'Incredibly inspirational' -- ***** Reader review 'Honestly, one of the best books I've read in a long time' -- ***** Reader review 'Read it and read it again, then read it again and then again' -- *****…
Princess Mononoke blew my mind. And as I read about Miyazaki himself I thought: here is a kindred spirit. I thought I’d try teaching a course on Miyazaki, not sure if I could sustain a whole semester just about his work—and then I found, there’s way more than a semester’s worth to talk about. After teaching about Miyazaki for a few years, I had to write it all down. Some reviews of my book say my essays are personal, and it’s true, for better or worse—it isn’t about Studio Ghibli or the production process or even about Japan—it’s my reflections on these great films.
This short book is a detailed study of just one great film, scholarly but without jargon.
Along the way, he points out many details I had missed. He also demonstrates the connections of Spirited Away to Miyazawa Kenji’s Night of the Milky Way Railway, and other sources and inter-textual references. Very interesting and revealing.
Spirited Away, directed by the veteran anime film-maker Hayao Miyazaki, is Japan's most successful film, and one of the top-grossing 'foreign language' films ever released. Set in modern Japan, the film is a wildly imaginative fantasy, at once personal and universal. It tells the story of a listless little girl, Chihiro, who stumbles into a magical world where gods relax in a palatial bathhouse, where there are giant babies and hard-working soot sprites, and where a train runs across the sea.
Andrew Osmond's insightful study describes how Miyazaki directed Spirited Away with a degree of creative control undreamt of in…
