Margot Robbie is not just a movie star. She is a storyteller. As an actress and producer, Robbie has built a career around bold choices. Her stories hit the audience in the gut, the heart, or the funny bone.

Her philosophy is a good story is not just a good idea. It is an experience.

Movies are an Emotional Experience

One of Robbie’s clearest storytelling philosophies is the audience’s emotional experience is the north star of storytelling. She makes movies for the people buying the tickets.

The best stories make us think because they first make us care.

Always be Original

Robbie believes, “You have to be original every time.”​

Writers often try to repeat the thing that worked. The same kind of protagonist. The same tone. The same twist. Formulas do have value. Genre makes promises to the audience. Readers want certain emotional payoffs. Mystery readers want the puzzle solved. Romance readers want a happy ending. Thriller readers want tension, escalation, and a twist.

Originality does not mean inventing a brand-new genre. It can be a fresh angle, a surprising character, an unexpected tone, or a new world.

You are aiming for a bold creative choice that serves the emotional experience of the story.

Barbie is a great example. It could have been a simple toy-brand comedy. Instead, it became a visually wild, emotionally layered, self-aware story about identity, perfection, patriarchy, girlhood, and aging.

The Margot Robbie Storytelling Test

Run your story through these two questions:

1. What emotional experience am I giving the audience?​
What will the reader feel scene by scene, moment by moment? If the emotion isn't there, what can I do to change or heighten the reader's experience. Once you know the emotional target, dialogue, pacing, setting, reveals, reversals, even sentence length can be aimed at that response.

2. Where am I being safe because it worked before?​
Look for the places where you reached for the familiar answer. Then ask what the stronger, truer, more specific choice might be.

Remember

Your job is to make the reader experience something. Make them lean in, worry and laugh. Make them need the next page, the next scene, the next chapter. Write the version they can feel in their bones. Emotion sells.

Dive Deeper

Tiffany Yates Martin’s article, “How to Be a Better Storyteller (A Margot Robbie Master Class),” is about Robbie telling a story so well that even people who already know the ending still lean forward to hear it.

In The Dialogue Doctor on Writing Emotion: How to Create an Emotional Journey that will Captivate Readers by Jeff Elkins, he explains all the tools a writer can use to make her reader feel different emotions.

​Margot Robbie Says she Makes Movies for the People Who Buy Tickets​

Catch Up Corner

​Writers, Work on Your Craft Like Margot Robbie​

​What you Need to Know when Writing About Real People​

​Your Books Should be on Bookshop.org​

Cheers,

Lindsey

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