My husband is switching careers into computer animation, and as a result of marital osmosis, (whatever information he absorbs trickles down to me in some affect), I’ve learned a lot about this field. Turns out, a lot of it can be applied to writing.

On a recent road trip, we listened to a 9-hour audiobook on the history of Pixar. While he was fascinated by the company’s humble beginnings in Silicon Valley and their limitless artistic vision, I jotted down notes of my own. True, some of us may have heard these lessons before, but there’s something about having a wooden toy doll illustrate a point that really hammered it all in for me.

Take Toy Story, for instance. The first full-length computer animated feature film got the green light from Disney based on a simple, few sentences long treatment. If I remember correctly, it went something like “All toys want to be loved and played with by children.” It summed up the characters’ motivations, conflict and the plot in just a few more sentences. It was everything my query letter needs to be—concise, intriguing, and focused on the essence of the story. If Pixar can leave out Mr. Potato Head and those green little cult-member alien toys from their treatment, I’ll have to leave my protagonist’s next-door neighbor who’s really a tertiary character out of my query letter. If they could sell their movie without going on about how Buzz straps himself to a rocket, I’ll have to pitch my novel without going into unnecessary detail about how my character feels when she finds her parents’ divorce papers after her father’s death.

Now, after they convinced someone to produce their film they went about perfecting the script. Of course we don’t have that luxury, we do this in reverse order, but I’m willing to put jealousy aside because of how they developed their characters. Originally, Woody was supposed to push Buzz out of a window on purpose, but the writers changed it because that made him unlikable, someone no one would care about. They rewrote him based on this genius principle: “Characterization should be revealed by the choices characters make when they are faced with a problem.” This way, the plot and the characters’ evolution throughout the story work in tandem with one another, not in a parallel fashion where they’re both going in the same direction but never really meet. I’ve since gone back to my manuscript, making sure that the moments when my characters make a decision reveal something about them.

Then the book arrived at the lawsuits. Apparently Pixar got sued, first by a children’s book writer, then by an artist, who claimed they’d infringed upon their properties when they made Monsters, Inc. They said they’d come up with the idea of monsters being scared of children and a one-eyed monster first. Neither won in court because they couldn’t prove Pixar had access to their properties and, more importantly, those ideas weren’t original (and you can’t copyright ideas). Chances are, my idea for my book isn’t original either, and neither is yours. Someone out there could be working on something similar as I type. What’s going to make it stand out? The execution, the artistry, the characters, the plot, the writing, the writing, the writing.