Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Surprise NYU Class Contains Some Great Writing Advice

Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s names have been bouncing around social media a lot lately — and not just because South Park warned everybody about that whole “Disney being pure evil” business. Multiple X/Twitter accounts have been generating thousands of likes with an old clip of the duo sharing the “greatest lesson in storytelling ever.” 

Back in 2011, the duo were guest lecturers in Professor Ken Liotti’s “Story-Telling Strategies” class at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Why? Well, it was all part of the show Stand In, which aired on mtvU, the MTV-owned channel for college students.

Each episode of Stand In found real, totally unsuspecting students being taught lessons by celebrity guests, such as Cameron Diaz, Seth MacFarlane and even Larry David, presumably because UCLA has an “Advanced Misanthropy” course. More regrettably, Ye guested in one episode, back when he was known as Kanye West. The episode isn’t online, so it’s unclear whether or not he spent the whole show force-feeding sushi to the students.

Parker and Stone’s surprise lesson was full of great advice, as the widely-shared clip illustrates. Specifically, Parker elucidated the need to provide motivation behind the events of a narrative, explaining that, when writing out the beats of a story outline, “If the words ‘and then’ belong between those beats, you’re fucked, basically. You’ve got something pretty boring. What should happen between every beat that you’ve written, is either the word ‘therefore’ or ‘but.’”

Parker and Stone also revealed that they will often write out the story beats of a South Park episode just to make sure that there is “causation between each beat.” Stone noted as well that ignoring this fundamental rule isn’t just a mistake that new writers make, even major Hollywood productions fall into this trap. “You see movies, and you’re just watching, and it’s like ‘this happened, and then this happens, and then this happens’. ... That’s not a movie. That’s not a story,” Stone told the class. 

Parker and Stone’s lesson has received the seal of approval from a number of creatives, including Robert King, the co-creator of shows like Evil and The Good Wife, who pointed out that the subject of this lesson “is the foundation for everything we do in the writers room,” while also bemoaning that many current shows in the streaming era have “lost this sense of causation.”

The full lecture doesn’t appear to be available anywhere, which is too bad, because it’s seemingly full of helpful information, including Parker and Stone’s suggestion to focus on simplicity when writing. “Just do one thing really right,” Stone stated. “All you need is clarity,” Parker added. 

They also reassured the class that they themselves still have fears and anxieties around writing, with Parker admitting that “having that blank page in front of us is still the most terrifying thing in the world.”

So even more terrifying than private detectives stalking you and going through your trash, apparently.

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