I remember back when Partly Cloudy came out on the front of Up, Pete Sohn gave a talk about what it was like to make it, and he related the film to a baby. He talked about how you’ve got this new thing with tons of potential, and you don’t know who it’s gonna grow up to be.

I’m going to expand on that a little, based on the shorts I’ve made and the one that’s in the works (that’s Sweetpea right there, in the cowboy hat). Sometimes, working on your story, it feels like everyone’s excited about your baby and so they’re throwing presents at you. You have to shield the baby from the presents that aren’t right for it - like bricks and dynamite and poison - while trying to collect the presents that will help it grow, like baby food.

Only, your baby is allergic to bananas, so you gotta watch out for that kind of baby food. Stuff that tastes bad makes baby stronger, even if it’s upset, but stuff that sends it into anaphylactic shock makes baby dead.

It gets tiring and sometimes it’s easy to think that everything people offer your storybaby will hurt it. It’s important to keep an open mind and remember that everyone is just trying to help because they’re excited about what the storybaby will grow up to be… and plus, if you guard the storybaby too fiercely, you never get the chance to see that someone else can provide for it, too.

Coparenting a storybaby is also hard, but when you have two people who understand the storybaby and want what’s best for it, disagreements come from a good place and arguments over what baby should be doing resolve into progress. That’s what you need, really, that’s why you’re feeding storybaby and shielding it from arrows: so it can grow and change into something that stands on its own, self-sufficient and confident and clear…

Because really, at the end of it all, you’ve gotta let go of storybaby and send it off to go play with the audience.