Inside Out and honesty in writing
Warning: there are minor spoilers ahead for the movie Inside Out.
Yesterday I re-watched Pixar's Inside Out movie with my wife and in-laws, and — as always — I was impressed by how invested I was in it. Especially near the end, you have a whole lot of emotion going on, while the story itself takes you through the process where the protagonist (Joy) learns that Sadness is important. Somehow, the emotion evoked at this point is exactly that: a mix of sadness and joy. Sad for the way Sadness had been treated, for the kid Reilly who is leaving her home. Joy for the hope on the horizon, for the understanding and realization that has just happened.
It reminded me very much of something that Niel Gaiman touched on in his masterclass, in one of the first few episodes named something like "Honesty in Fiction". He says that, with storytelling, you're basically telling an elaborate lie to people and while people are good at "suspending their disbelief" they won't connect with the story unless there is an emotional something that stirs up feelings in them. Emotions are like the seasoning of the story that differentiates synthetic industrialized food from a feast of homegrown produce.
The honesty part comes from the fact that for him (and I think pretty much for everyone) it's impossible to add emotion to a story unless that emotion comes from somewhere inside oneself. In this episode he mentioned multiple times the advice that one needs to open up more than one would usually be comfortable with.
The movie, being about emotions, is a good candidate for expressing emotional topics. But really, this can be done with whatever topic one chooses. The themes themselves that are treated in the movie are not specific to abstract things, they're actually very much everyday human things. The theme of being happy with something and then losing it for reasons outside of one's own control. The theme of not appreciating something and then realizing that it was actually a great thing to begin with. The complementary theme of feeling not appreciated, and then realizing one's own value and being able to contribute to the world. The crushing theme of letting go, and being let go of, of wanting someone but that other not reciprocating the feeling — not with malice, just because they don't think about you anymore.
Anyway, suffice it to say that it was a great study in what things other people are doing that work for me. A chance to appreciate the importance of emotion in storytelling.
I don't know about others but for me a great story is mainly great because of how it's written and not so much for the idea behind it. If you have an awesome idea with a bad execution then the story will be hard to connect with. But you can have a mediocre plot with a great execution and the resulting story will be great. What differentiates a good execution from a bad one is how human the story ends up being, how much we end up emotionally connecting with it.