Save the Cat!: The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need

It was still, as far as I knew, a work in progress.

And about a year and a half later, Dan's, uh, wife, Diane, who I'd become friendly with during the course of working on the book, approached me and said Michael Wiese Productions, who published Save the Cat and The Writer's Journey and tons of really well-known screenwriting books, are interested in publishing Dan's book.

But the manuscript is not 100% ready to go, and they need somebody to take it on, do some polishing, tighten up some sections, and sort of finish things up.

You knew Dan better than anybody on this book.

And now back to the show.

But yeah, we, we, we addressed Lajos Egri, we addressed Syd Field, Robert McKee.

We didn't get too much into Blake Snyder, who's kind of like the big, hot, uh, screenwriter now, the author of Save the Cat!, late author of Save the Cat!.

Yeah.

I mean, I would say overall we know the three-act story structure.

But as romance writers, we're often following the Save the Cat storytelling beats.

That's very popular in romance stories.

It's still three acts though.

It's just, um, yeah, it's broken down into more beats to fit into the acts just so it's easier to, to follow it.

Um, And I also often will refer to a book called Romancing the Beat, which is by Gwen Hayes, which is a little bit more even like finely tuned to romance.

Because again, when you have A normal, like, save the cat storytelling structure has the hero, okay? And you're following the hero's journey.

And actually, the hero's journey itself is a storytelling plot structure that there's plenty of books that tell that, too.

So I didn't find it overly confusing.

I do think it's It is not the save the cat model of storytelling.

And I think that's risky for a writer starting out.

But I think when it works, it's really exciting and fresh to see something different.

And so I think that this actually does work.

And so I really like that about it.

You say it's not the save the cat.

It's not the stereotypical type of the way it tells the story.

It really was a spectacular foundation in acting that then I took to the West Coast to USC and got a Bachelor of Fine Arts in acting there.

And between all of that, I feel like it just really gave me a strong foundation in the written word, breaking down scripts as an actor, started leaning into directing more, and also opening up to, like, I mean, if you're reading scripts and you're seeing that structure, you have this innate understanding of how scripts work, how stories work, without having to get into... you know, into the Greek, because you, I mean, you read about the Greek tragedies, you're reading Sophocles, Euripides, and so you innately sort of understand it without having to, you know, take a Sid Field, you know, screenwriting book and where they tell you what you kind of already know, like, oh, yeah, okay, I just knew that's what that was, but now I know, you know, thanks, Linda Sager, now I know that's the first turn, or, you know, or, you know, reading, you know, Save the Cat and Blake Snyder, they're all fun to sort of read and kind of brush up um you know every few months or every year and uh see someone else's sort of take on dan harman's story circle is another one uh um so you know there's a lot of different ways in in terms of structure and that sort of thing but for me coming from background and acting um I crossed over the aisle into filmmaking.

I was really lucky.

My first project out of the gate was a project I wrote and I produced and acted in, and Craig Zobel from The Penguin and Mayor of Easttown.

Um, I, I think the fundamentals of storytelling, like the principles of storytelling.

Um, my husband and I are, are going through, um, Save the Cat by Blake Snyder.

Yeah.

And he talks about, like, you know, he's-- It's a conglomeration of a lot of different storytelling te- There's tons of storytelling books out there, and different frameworks and, you know, Joseph Campbell-

That would be, that's the idea or the concept.

The second level is the structuring that out into specific what's going to happen from scene to scene and act to act, whether that's a loose structure, like in a four page story, like save the cat beat sheet or whether that's a scene by scene outline that goes 10 to 15 pages or more that's the the decision of what's going to happen from scene to scene the third thing is the actual words on the page the dialogue and the description the slug lines and the actual how you execute those scenes and so when i think about what's the most important thing to your script success what i said in the book i believe was 60 is the idea and 30% the structure, 10% the words on the page.

Now, that's just a very unscientific, rough estimate for me to just kind of make the point that people way overestimate the importance of the words on the page.

Now, they still have to be professional level and really good for a script to go anywhere.

Everything's a variation or an evolution on something that's come before.

And often the most successful writers are writing within a very proven genre where they're observing all of its basic rules and, and, But they're just adding something to it that's uniquely them or unique to that particular story.

And I personally really like Save the Cats 10 genres where 10 different types of stories that he thinks are repeated over and over again, which is very different from the normal way we think of genre to make sure that you're fitting within a certain genre or certain type of story while also adding whatever it is that's original to you.

Yeah, I think original is a particular challenge for new screenwriters trying to find that balance.

This week on Writer's Inc.

That's when I learned that I needed to actually figure out how to tell a story, which is what led me to Save the Cat, the original Blake Snyder screenwriting method.

J.K. Rowling was nearly homeless when she wrote the first Harry Potter book.

Stephen King penned Carrie in a small desk wedged between a washer and dryer.

And I worked on my very first novel.

And I tried to sell that novel and it got rejected all over town.

And that's when I learned that I needed to actually figure out how to tell a story, which is what led me to Save the Cat, the original Blake Snyder screenwriting method.

I rewrote my book based on that, which was an enlightening book to read.

I think it's smart to learn the three-act structure because it really is just pretty simple rules to make your story go from just a mess that goes nowhere into a really coherent, strong story.

And so I think if you're thinking of writing something, understanding the save the cat rules, which gets very granular and specific, or just the idea of what you're going for in three acts.

The way the story develops and things like that.

I think it is very helpful.

But I guess the thing that I would push back sometimes on is that... a lot of students are like, I don't want to have the three-act structure.

I just want life to happen.

And then you sometimes have other students who are like, I need to do everything exactly the way that Save the Cat says to do it.

Save the Cat, if people don't know, is a book about screenwriting, and it breaks down sort of 10 minutes into the movie, this is supposed to happen.