I didn’t finish the first two books I tried to write because their plots just fizzled out at the midpoint. That was a lesson I learned the hard way. Often I will stray from my original outline, but by having the outline there in front of me, when I do make a change, I do it deliberately, and I think about how the change will affect all the other plot points before I do a lot of work that will lead me to a dead end. I keep the bulletin board in front of me as I’m writing so that I can remind myself to stay on track as I write. I use red, yellow, and green post-it notes for the different acts–that way my outline color-matches the Scrivener Project Target tracker. Here’s what works for me: I have the beats all laid out on a couple of sheets of paper that I have pinned to a bulletin board. Me? I need to have the beats spelled out for me, and I spend a lot of time structuring my story before I ever get started writing. I’m convinced that natural story writers–those mythical people who have stories running through their veins and who can sit down and write a final draft with no outline–architect their stories this way instinctively. Blake Snyder didn’t invent them, he just noticed them.
And once I knew what the beats were and started paying attention, I realized that they’re universal. He describes them in a clear way that made sense to me as a fledgling fiction writer. It converted me from a pantser to a plotter, and it’s no coincidence that the first book I actually finished was conceived using the beat sheet.īlake Snyder’s beat sheet has 15 beats. The masterpiece of Save the Cat! is the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet. It helped me understand for the first time that story has a universal structure. It is a meandering and surprising historical ghost story, so different than many Disney movies, yet the beats are all there, just the same.įor me, reading Save the Cat! was an epiphany.
One good example was Seer of Shadows by Avi. And I’ll be darned if all of the beats weren’t there in just about every novel we read. The Middle Grade Lunch Break group read Save the Cat!, and for several months afterwards, as an exercise, we applied the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet to the middle grade novels that we were reading.
Zootopia, for example, is a model Save the Cat! movie: it has a strong theme, shows good character growth for all of the characters, not just the main character, and hits all of the plot points Snyder describes.īut the beat sheet isn’t just for movies. It’s especially easy to see in Disney and Pixar films, as well as other kids’ movies. Many movies do use the beat sheet, created by Blake Snyder. You might think that Save the Cat ! is just a book about screenwriting, given that its subtitle is “The Last Book On Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need.”
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