“Save the Cat!” is a book, a method, and to its adherents, it is also a kind of faith proposition. It bills itself as “The Last Book on Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need” but honestly, it might also be the first one that you’ll ever need. There’s no doubt that it is geared to screenwriters, especially those who are looking for commercial success. And yet, I can’t help but feel that it makes outstanding reading for novelists, playwrights, and moviegoers in general.
What the book does so brilliantly is make a case for a universal structure that underlies the most compelling stories of the silver screen (as well as their more modern counterparts). There are 15 “beats” to a movie, Blake Snyder writes. And it’s not so much that he prescribes these 15 beats as he notices that they are present everywhere that there is good storytelling. He didn’t make the rule that stories have to be about a protagonist’s personal transformation. He simply noticed that an audience won’t feel complete unless it happens.
The beat sheet, the 15 parts of a story, is a check to make sure that the story is rich and well-considered enough to compel the audience. Snyder gives examples of what happens when one or two beats are missing, and gives examples of how getting a couple of beats wrong makes the whole movie unsatisfying (or, in Snyder-speak, unsalable).
One of the challenges of craft books in general is that they can feel a little bit like manuals of what not to do, rather than helpful advice of how to do it better. For example, in his book Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster writes:
“The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died and then the queen died of grief” is a plot… “The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king.” This is a plot with a mystery in it, a form capable of high development.
The point of this tidbit of advice is supposedly a helpful one, to remind writers that events in their stories need to be causally connected. Nobody likes a story in which too-convenient developments happen at just the right moment, as though plot points come through otherworldly intervention instead of the consequences of a character’s actions. At the same time, if you really get behind Forster’s advice, all it can do is point out what is missing. It can’t fill in for you the “why” and it can’t connect events plausibly. The advice reads more like “don’t not-connect events” rather than suggest a way that you could thread causality through your story.
Save the Cat! promises not only the analysis of why your plot might not be working, but the fundamental rules of what is necessary for it to work.
Take, for example, his emphasis on the first and last images of the movie, which in Save the Cat! are supposed to be mirror images of each other. Now that I’ve read the book, I pay a lot of attention to these images, and it’s clear that almost the whole story of transformation can be told in the juxtaposition of these two images. You can read them like an arrow, pointing to what the protagonist needed to learn.
One of the films discussed in the book is Sandra Bullock’s movie Miss Congeniality, in which a female FBI agent who was always “one of the boys” goes undercover at a women’s beauty pageant to investigate a crime. The movie’s theme is about femininity, exploring the possibility of being both tough and a woman. The first opening image is a flashback of Sandra Bullock’s character as a young tomboy, beating up boys on the playground, and then there is a present-day scene of here as an FBI agent, still surrounded by men. The final image is the complete opposite: all gussied up, she is surrounded by women, and presented with an award by her fellow contestants. If you only knew about those two images, you would still know what the movie is about.
Is this a formula? Sort of. It’s a check. And it works exceedingly well for the extremely visual medium of movies. After reading this book, I will always pay attention to the first image, what is being communicated to me by the director, and what I am to expect.
But I’m not interested in writing movies, and I love novels that would make poor adaptations to movies. Those would be (among other possibilities): novels whose central arc contains a developing awareness which is hard to show visually and requires a narrator’s interior awareness. Is the Save the Cat! Method still applicable?
Let me cut to the chase: only if you want to write a compelling story. And then, decidedly yes.
As humans who have heard countless stories, we have a deep and felt intuition about how they work. But we’re not always correct about this. If I had to repeat the story as I heard it, I might very well recount: the king died, and then the queen died. This book is an excellent reminder: be sure to get that “of grief” in there. It makes all the difference.