Letters of Note is a wonderful site I’ve featured before. It has a simple mandate: “Letters of Note is an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos.” Here is a great example forwarded to me by Franklin.

Mid-2008, hoping at best to receive a signed photo from his idol in return, a young man named Adam wrote to Pete Docter, the award-winning director of Monsters, Inc. and, more recently, Up. In the letter he spoke of his admiration for Docter and, as an amateur filmmaker and huge Pixar fan, mentioned his desire to work for the studio in the future. Lo and behold, months later the lovely handwritten note seen below arrived on Adam’s doorstep. Says Adam:

Here is what I received from Pete Docter, one of the most influential and important people at Pixar, the best animation studio on the planet.

Transcript follows. Many thanks to Adam for allowing us to feature his letter.

You can go to the site to read the rest of Docter’s letter as well as the transcript. Here is a key excerpt:

You are sure right about the importance of a good story in movies. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as it sounds. It takes a lot of work (and rework, and rework and rework) to get it right. And even then quite often we’re not 100% pleased.

As John Lasseter likes to say, our films don’t get finished, they just get released.

This last point was echoed in a recent conversation I had with Mary Coleman who heads up Pixar’s story department. She indicated that even the idea of them “locking” the script is elusive because “we’ll keep at it [changes] if the story’s not right yet,” even up through production which is really hard to do in the world of animation.

This commitment to getting the story right shows in the quality of Pixar movies as well as their extraordinary success at the box office: 12 movies, 12 #1 hits. As we begin a new year, it is an attitude each of us would be well advised to adopt with our own writing.

Of course at some point, we do need to finish our scripts. If you want an approach to know when your script is ready to go out to buyers, you can go here to a GITS Q&A: When can you stop tinkering with a script and finally say “done”?