Write On: 'Inside Out 2' Co-Writers Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein

“People think sequels are easier, and I’m like, ‘No, no, it’s
much harder. It is much harder to write.’ They have never written
sequels, those people, because you need to do everything as well
as the first and yet better, and go to new places, follow all the
world rules, but create new ones. I mean, it’s just so many balls
in the air,” says Meg LeFauve, co-writer for Inside Out 2, along
with Dave Holstein. 


In this special live episode from the Writers Guild Foundation
Library, Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein talk about tackling a
whole new set of challenges as they wrote the sequel to the
beloved movie Inside Out. They also discuss the 5-year Pixar
development process that includes the concept of failing fast.


“They really want you pushing to things that are new and
innovative, so they expect you to fail. They actually want you to
fail but they want you to do that quickly, right? Because we only
have five years, so it’s always like, hurry up, hurry up. You
know, fail. Go again. Go again,” she says.


Holstein shared some very personal advice for writing coming of
age stories, like the Inside Out movies: get
micro-focused. 


“Sometimes it’s better to zoom in than to zoom out. For me, it
helps to zoom in on a detail and let the detail be a microcosm
for the rest of it. I know that when we were writing this film, I
was thinking about my anxiety at that age and where that came
from. I had a speech impediment, I had a stutter, so I hated
Spanish class because I had to read out loud, and my stutter
always came out in front of people, which made me very, very
anxious. And I feel like, for Riley, there’s a three-day hockey
camp that could determine the rest of her life. That’s where I
sort of sunk into and if I was writing a different story about
me, I would have gone into those details. But for me, it was
about finding something very specific and very small,” says
Holstein.


To hear more about the writing process, listen to the
podcast.